Adam Hills is possibly the most travelled comic in the world. He hails from Sydney, and spends a lot of time in the UK. His agent, meanwhile, is the Dublin-based Lisa Richards Comedy Agency. You need a special phone card just to give Adam a buzz.
On this occasion, he answers from his hotel room in LA, where he’s been busily schmoozing TV executives. He’s in California, for an industry showcase, where he will attempt to persuade some men in suits to give him a television show.
“I did a showcase on Wednesday night for a whole bunch of industry bods that we’re trying to pitch a TV show to,” he explains. “So they saw me do what was almost a stage version of the show and now I’ve got to go to pitching meetings this week and try to pitch it to about three different networks.”
This is not the first occasion he’s been through the mill. “It’s about my fourth trip [to LA] and each time I manage to achieve just a tiny little bit more,” he says. “I was in Aspen in February and a producer saw me there and asked me to come out. So I came out in August and had a meeting with him and then that meeting became a proposal for a TV idea which became a pitch which we’re now making to the networks”.
‘Pitching to the networks’ has a chilling ring to it. It sounds like at once the most thrilling and dreadful place to be. As yet, Hills admits he has some distance to go before reaching comedy Nirvana. The new pitch, is not, he admits an original one. “It’s basically the same kind of idea that every stand-up comic’s been pitching around the world for the last 30 years, which is: ‘I travel round the world doing stand up and you film it’. So I’m certainly not getting carried away with it at all.”
Hills admits that he is something of a natural vagrant. This, he says, is unavoidable if you come from Australia and harbour serious ambitions of a comedy career.
“In Australia, there’s the kind of logical step that you do stand-up, then you move into radio, then you move in to television. This is because you can’t make a career of stand-up in Australia”.
“Ah,” I interrupt. “Like Ireland.”
“Pretty much” he agrees. “Except in Australia, there’s this big step where comedians are employed to do breakfast radio shows and paid megabucks. Upwards of a million dollars to host a radio show.”
“Ah,” I retract. “Not at all like in Ireland”
“It’s a weird thing. It only seems to happen in Australia. It doesn’t happen in the States or England or Ireland. If you wanna stay in Australia and make money, that’s what you gotta do. I wanted to keep doing stand-up and keep expanding around the world.”
Hills’ attempt at world conquest began with an assault on the bloody beaches of the Edinburgh Fringe.
“I jumped in at the deep end and knew so little about the Edinburgh Festival that I wasn’t as in awe of it as I probably should’ve been,” he recalls. “I had no idea what the Perrier Award was and why it was an important thing to win.”
In his time, he has come close to bagging the Perrier on several occasions.
“It’s lovely to think that I turned up there not knowing what the Perrier was and then was nominated three years in a row and now am inextricably linked to it as a loser,” he says.
This year, he chose to forgo Edinburgh and try his luck in LA instead. Is he sick of stand-up? The answer, he says, is ‘sort of’. He wonders why comedians have to jump through the same hoops, year after year.
“You work up a new show. You get it flowing in maybe Adelaide or Melbourne, you take it to Edinburgh, you take it on tour for a while. It's just starting to get really good and then you have to throw it out and start all over again,” he explains.”
There’s no logical reason for this, Hills suggests. That’s just how it is. From now on, he is determined to do things on his own terms. “I am already preparing a show for next year. But now I’m doing it on my own terms. I’m doing it because I’ve got some things that I want to say, not because I’ve got a deadline that I have to make”.
Hills believes his strength is his status as an eternal outsider. With one foot in Australia and another somewhere between Dublin and L.A., he might appear rootless (and also in danger of an historic groin strain). However, he feels that being the stranger in town lets him appreciate the absurdities of life in ways a local cannot.
“Billy Connolly comes to Australia and talks about Sydney for 20 minutes and points out the stuff that you see every day and you’ve never questioned its absurdity until some Scotsman comes and says ‘What is it with you and your harbour bridge?’ And everyone goes ‘Oh my god, we’ve noticed it, but we’ve never realised how absurd it is’. In a way it means I’m a permanent outsider. It means I go back to Australia with fresh eyes. I come back and look at what’s going on in Australia and go ‘my god, why are you just accepting this shit?’”b