Meet the Fabulous Adam Richards – Part One

Introducing the Australian comedian, actor, radio presenter, writer and first openly gay Australian media personality. It is the Fabulous Adam Richards!

A stand-up comedian since 1997, Adam has performed all over Australia, Britain and the USA. He began his gossip queen career as Triple J’s Mister Bitch and spent eight years as The Fabulous Adam Richard, part of Melbourne’s FM breakfast team The Matt and Jo Show on 101.9 Fox FM.

Adam has appeared as a guest on such embarrassing television ventures as Celebrity Dog School, Celebrity Splash, Hole in the Wall (what is it with all the swimming pools?), and The Footy Show. He has also appeared in more classy fare, like Celebrity Letters and Numbers, Can of Worms, Chelsea Lately, Rove and Tractor Monkeys. He is the co-writer and co-star of the 2012 ABC TV comedy series Outland, about a group of gay science fiction fans. Adam was one of the team captains, along with Ella Hooper, on the rebooted Spicks and Specks hosted by Josh Earl, and a panellist on ABC series Whovians, a show dedicated to the Doctor Who fandom.

Adam was a national finalist in the 1997 Raw Comedy competition. He was the recipient of a Moosehead Award grant in 1998 for his first-ever full-length stand-up comedy show Tragedy. In ‘98 he also played Sydney and Edinburgh in the live show oz.dot.comedy with Carl Barron, the subject of a Comedy Channel documentary directed by Kevin Carlin. In ‘99 Adam made his commercial television debut performing stand-up comedy on Hey Hey It’s Saturday. He has self-produced several shows for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival since 1999’s Adam Richard in Disgrace. In 2014, Adam performed Gaypocalypse – his first solo festival show in seven years at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. In 2015, he returned to MICF with his show #FGT.

Adam was a co-producer and presenter of the live comedy night and podcast The Shelf with Justin Hamilton and producer and presenter of The Poofcast (with Scott Brennan and Toby Sullivan, aka Talking Poofy). In 2019, he launched his podcast, Adam Richard Has A Theory. Adam is also the co-host of the Me. I Am. A Memoir. The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Mariah Carey’ podcast alongside Phillip Lee Curtis.

Adam is currently a senior writer on the ABC comedy quiz series Hard Quiz and Hard Quiz Kids.

Luka Musicki (L.M.): So Adam, how did you get into comedy? What was the motivation and passion to do it? What is the style of comedy? Stand-up, slapstick, dark or queer comedy (the last one could be a genre, not sure), thoughts? 

Adam Richards (A.R.): I kind of fell into standup comedy accidentally. I was going to a lot of gigs with friends in the industry, like Corinne Grant, who was a standup herself at the time, and Katie Pinder, who was working at Token, a comedy agency and production company. I was subject to a lot of homophobic material back then in the dim dark late nineties. At a Christmas party at Tim Ross’s sharehouse, I was complaining to comedy producer Ged Wood that Australia needed a gay comedian to redress the balance, like a right of reply. He suggested that could be me, but I had never entertained the idea of performing standup. He said he would book me in for a gig in March and I could just see how I went, but being impatient, I said ‘I’ll do it next week.’ And I did. And I kept doing it for 22 years.

My standup was mostly observational, which was the style at the time! Part-confessional, a bit bitchy, some celebrity gossip, and in the beginning, a lot of my material was riffing on the offensive stuff I’d seen. Like a comedian who once described a pair of jeans as gay. Which I suggested was perhaps because before he put them on, he’d had to take them out of the closet. So maybe all jeans are gay!

L.M.: Following up with the comedy scene, you must have done a lot of comedy shows, fringe and comedy festivals, and met a lot of comedians as well. As far as my research into this goes, you have done the following comedy shows, there was Spitsecondism, Gaypocalypse, #FGT, and anything else missing?

A.R.: My first solo standup comedy show was a 1998 Moosehead Award grant recipient called Tragedy, which was about the sudden death of my mother, and the suicide of an ex-boyfriend. It had a dance break in the middle. Later that year, I hosted a stand-up show called oz.com.edy in Sydney and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which featured Carl Barron and was filmed for Foxtel’s Comedy Channel. I was also a regular guest on the Channel 31 tv series The Loft Live hosted by Rove McManus. The next year at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival was a show called Adam Richard in Disgrace, where I sat on a couch and read out ludicrous articles from Woman’s Day and New Idea. While publicising this show, I appeared on Hey Hey, It’s Saturday, performing stand-up, and was asked back later that year. I was also on Rove, on Channel 9 that year, and began writing quiz questions and jokes for Channel 7’s All-Star Squares. I also did sketch shows with Rove McManus, Peter Helliar and Kim Hope (Shame, Sassy, Outrageous), plus a couple of shows with Miss Itchy and co-created Talking Poofy, a live show and eventual podcast with Scott Brennan and Toby Sullivan, and sometimes Wes Snelling. Did a Melbourne Fringe show in 2001 called Adam Richard in Distress about going through a breakup and how much fun it is to be single, with an encore season at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2002. Adam Richard – Made for Television in 2002, Adam Richard – Bitch in 2004, Fabulous Adam Richard in 2006, Adam Richard – Driven and Adam Richard – X in 2007 (it was my tenth year, I had no idea that six months later Kylie would release an album of the same name for the same reason – great minds!). Co-hosted weekly comedy show The Shelf with Justin Hamilton through much of the 2010s, which featured pretty much the who’s who of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, from all over the world. Gaypocalypse in 2014, #FGT in 2015 and Splitsecondism in 2016. I stopped performing standup comedy in 2018. There was no big announcement or part or anything. I just stopped booking gigs. I’ve done one standup spot since then, at Justin Hamilton’s 50th birthday in Adelaide, a few years ago. It was fun, but I have no desire to step back on stage.

L.M.: And you also do radio hosting and podcasting as well? What was the motivation and drive with this? Did it come naturally? I did remember you on the Matt and Jo Show on 101.9 Fox FM, you were so good.

A.R.: Nawww. Thanks Luka. Much appreciated. I started at The Fox in 2003 thinking it would probably last a month, at best, because we were following in the footsteps of a phenomenally successful show. Next thing you know, it is 2013 and I’ve spent an entire decade getting up at 4am to talk crap about Lindsay Lohan. Radio and podcasting is a very different skill to performing on stage. You’re talking to the people in the room, and one other that you can’t see, who is driving their car, or going for a run, or doing the dishes. 

L.M.: Following up on the podcasting, you have many podcasts, ‘Adam Richard has a theory’, “Night Terrace”,  “Me. I am a Memoir’, and ’Talking Poofy. The Poofcast”. What got you into podcasting? Is it the new radio that people can listen to without the commercial barriers to be themselves? And how did you create those podcasts? Do you have link to them?

A.R.: My first podcast was The Poofcast featuring Talking Poofy. I produced it like the breakfast radio show I did every morning, recording with Scott and Toby on weekends at the Fox studios. There were interviews, sketches, regular segments that delved into sexuality, advice, history. It was five years beforeSerial, so the podcast listening audience wasn’t huge, but they were engaged aged passionate. 

Currently I do a daily Doctor Who podcast called Adam Richard Has a Theory, and another with Phillip Lee Curtis called Glitter+ that has looked at Mariah Carey’s memoir and discography, Jennifer Lopez’s music, Cher’s memoir, a made up 90s science fiction show called Christine Lahti in Space and we also watch made for TV movies.

I recently wrote an honours thesis about podcasting, so I could talk about the affordances of podcasting, the building of community rather than audiences, and the remediation of Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding in the incorporation of listener voices — honestly, I could go on and on and on; I wrote fifteen thousand words on it and I’ve achieved First Class Honours, so I am really tedious about it now.

>>Glitter+ https://linktr.ee/glitterplus

>>Adam Richard Has a Theory https://linktr.ee/theorypodcast

>>The Poofcast https://shows.acast.com/talking-poofy

L.M.: You have been on TV as well, with Celebrity Letters and Numbers on SBS, and HardQuiz and Spicks and Specks and Whovians on the ABC, what was the experience like for you being on tv, and having a great laugh through it all? Do the TV shows ask you (and/or your agency) to be on shows, or do you ask to be on them, or is it auditions? What is your involvement with them – panellist, host, organiser?

A.R.: The only one of the shows you mentioned that I’ve ever auditioned for was to be a team captain on the rebooted series of Spicks and Specks with Josh Earl hosting and Ella Hooper. Otherwise, my agent rings or emails and says ‘do you want to do this?’ Rove asked me to be a regular panellist on Whovians, because we’ve known each other since the dawn of time (the late nineties) and he knew how much of a fan of Doctor Who I was. 

The host of Celebrity Letters and Numbers, Michael Hing, asked me to come in and do that show because he knew I didn’t live far from the studios (where they also make Home & Away) and they were desperate for guests. It was the middle of covid lockdowns and nobody could come from interstate, and even people from the other side of the harbour weren’t allowed to cross the bridge. I was a contestant on some episodes, and hung out in Dictionary Corner with David Astle in others. I was a bit reticent, because I’d sworn off doing celebrity shows after inauspicious experiences on Celebrity Dog School, Celebrity Splash and a gruesome fatshaming episode of Hole in the Wall.

I’ve never actually been on Hard Quiz, but I have been writing for the show since the pilot episodes in 2016, which I joined after five seasons of writing for The Chase Australia. I love working with Tom Gleeson and the entire Hard Quiz production crew. I’m now in my tenth year of writing for Hard Quiz, and I’ve been a senior writer since season four. It really is the best job I’ve ever had in my career; it combines my love of research, writing and joking about, plus I get to sit in the studio and whack the buttons that mark the contestants right or wrong. The buttons in the control room are the same buttons I used to whack down in the studio when I was a team captain on Spicks and Specks. When they were first installed, they still had Spicks and Specks stickers on them, so I dramatically flapped about the studio claiming to have been triggered.

L.M.: I can see from one of your facebook posts, that you had a great spot at Sydney Mardi Gras (ABC), what was the experience like working with ABC (as a writer, right?), especially with Sydney Mardi Gras? I was in the Mardi Gras Parade and it was a bit coverage of the Harbour City Bears, was this your doing (JK)?

A.R.: Yeah, I wrote about three hundred pages of script for the ABC Mardi Gras broadcast. I wrote the ‘float bible’ that Courtney Act, Mon Schafter, Georgie Stone, Steph Tisdell and Simon Burke relied on for information during the broadcast, as well as a bunch of their hosting links and throws to Jeremy Fernandez and Mel Buttle. There were even moments where I was writing into the autocue on the night, as things like Kylie Minogue’s message from her concert arrived. 

Working on Mardi Gras was just the most wonderful experience. Most of the producers and support staff in the office were queer, and it just felt great to be advocating for and championing diversity during what seems like a global push against it. There was a moment where I started to get quite emotional as Georgie was speaking, and I had completely forgotten I’d written what she was reading. It was a huge responsibility making sure the intent and purpose behind the Mardi Gras floats was able to be communicated effectively and succinctly to the huge audience at home. We really are lucky to live in a country that has a publicly funded television broadcast network that is prepared to broadcast the Mardi Gras live. I felt really privileged to have been asked to contribute the broadcast and I really have huge respect and admiration for the entire crew the produces the show, and every single community group that treads the path that ended in such horror and violence back in 1978.

L.M.: Now, I did do “a bit” of Facebook sleuthing or honestly scrolling on your Facebook photo album (nothing weird about doing that, right?). So anyway, as you can imagine, I have so many questions (hence an interview is a convenient great platform for this). You have gone from no beard to moustache to beard, which do you prefer (please say beard)? You seem like to Doctor Who series, which series is your favourite? And you do a lot of walking around, what is the routine like (parks, shops) around Sydney?

A.R.: I was a baldy face for a few years, and in 2023 I busted my knee while on holiday, and ended up spending all of World Pride in bed with an ironically straight leg. I could hear the festivities and nights and nights of partying outside my apartment window — I live in Waterloo, which is so gay, it’s an ABBA song. I was in hospital for about a week or more after surgery, so when it came time to shave, I decided to go back to the moustache I’d had from about 2012. I had a MASSIVE beard when I was appearing on Whovians and writing for Hard Quiz from about 2017 and then after completing a half-marathon in 2019 decided to get rid of all my facial hair. I’d lost 40kg, and more often than not, I’d tried to use facial hair to create some kind of jawline on my enormous balloon head. 

I grew my beard back just recently. My partner seems to love it, keeps telling me I look like a proper writer (despite having earned my living doing that for the entire time I’ve known him). It seems to turn a lot of heads. Everyone has a moustache now, which is part of why I let all the white hair grow back. I don’t entirely love the extra grooming. Beard dandruff is a lot. Russell Crowe, of all people, gave me some tips on maintenance and tidying. I haven’t had hair since the nineties, so it’s more than I’m used to.

I do love Doctor Who. I’ve recently recorded the 1150th episode of my daily Doctor Who podcast, so I talk about it a lot, so I have many favourites from sixty years of Doctor Who, and I talk about them a lot, and the ones I don’t like, and all sorts of other malarkey.

L.M.: And I did some slething on good old Wikipedia (how I got my bachelor degree before ChatGPT was a thing, haha, jokes), so you are a Australian comedian (check), actor (check), radio presenter (check), writer (check) and media personality (obviously the most fabulous one). Is there something missing?

A.R.: No, that’s pretty much it. Ran a half-marathon one time. Have directed some comedy shows for other comedians. Mentored some comedians. I’m currently mentoring some senior writers. I was the writer of the game segments of the Hard Quiz Live shows for Tom Gleeson and Token Events. I recently attained a university degree in creative writing from UTS. I’m the producer of all of my podcasts, and the editor, even the video editor of Glitter+ which we pop up on YouTube. I’ve had short stories published. Voiced an animation. Sung a promo for radio. On Rove Live I once had 300 nude men run toward me on a football field to win money, stood in the Myer windows in Melbourne, and dressed as Princess Leia at a Penrith shopping centre. I’ve had quite a fun career, to be quite honest.

This the end of Part One. If you want to see Part Two, please click here.