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advertising. That approach should be followed here.’
    By the early 1980s, Phillip was sick of the ad industry and exhausted not only from it but additionally from film-making, writing columns — even if he enjoyed the activity — and sitting on many Victorian and federal government bodies. In 1983, MDA’s partners floated the agency on the stock exchange, then bought Alan ‘Mo’ Morris and Allan ‘Jo’ Johnston’s Mojo agency, which had made the ads ‘Put Another Shrimp on the Barbie’, ‘C’mon Aussie, C’mon’, ‘I Feel Like a Toohey’s’ and Paul Hogan’s ‘Anyhow, have a Winfield’. In 1989, Mojo-MDA, with billings of $500 million, received a takeover offer from Chiat-Day of Madison Avenue, resulting in $A77 million being spread largely among the three partners.
    Brian Monahan bought a cosmetics business. He thought it would be a simple marketing exercise to crank up the brand, Natural Glow. He didn’t understand the manufacturing, distribution and retailing problems but later found a CEO with industry knowledge and the brand, now called Natural Glamour, is sold in all Kmart and Priceline stores and several thousand chemist shops. Lyle Dayman bought a farm at Yea in Victoria and later returned to his home state of South Australia, where he has a house on the beach at Somerton Park. He paints landscapes and streetscapes for his own pleasure and his paintings are sold in local galleries.
    Adams’ campaign, in columns and in the Labor Party, against televised political ads led to the Hawke Government (1983-91) banning any commercials of less than two minutes’ duration so that parties could not ‘hit and run’. The networks were also required to give free time during election campaigns. Adams and his supporters were pleased that they had actually changed the laws, but then the High Court overturned the laws on the grounds that they were against free speech.
    Adams has maintained friendships he made in his thirty-five advertising years, particularly with Peter Best, Brian Monahan and Bruce Petty. Peter Best told me Adams wrote an email to him a little while ago that said, ‘Here we were, two old lefties who put a lot of time and energy into helping advertisers get richer — talk about supping with the Devil. But we had fun in advertising and when it ceased being fun, we both got out.’

Chapter Four:
Having Fun Making Films
    Phillip Adams told me during one of our hour-long sessions at his office at Paddington in Sydney, ‘I bought a clockwork movie camera for sixty quid, but it was useless.’ We were discussing his first forays into film-making, which sprang from his experiences making commercials at the Melbourne advertising agency Briggs and James in the early 1960s. He and a colleague, Brian Robinson, wondered whether, if they could make commercials, could they make movies? A few loonies and brave souls were experimenting with film; why shouldn’t they join them? They had to put up their own money, of course — hence the sixty quid expenditure.
    â€˜The camera ran for twenty seconds and then stopped,’ Adams continued. ‘So you could have no shot longer than twenty seconds. And we couldn’t record sound. We edited literally with scissors and sticky tape. We had no gear and when we needed light interiors, we would borrow emergency lighting from road gangs. And when I say “borrow”, I mean we borrowed it and took it back later, hoping no-one had noticed.’
    With the most primitive equipment, Brian and Phillip started to make a feature film. It cost them six thousand dollars, took six years of their spare time and was the story of a love affair between a kindergarten teacher, Jill, and a bikie tow-truck driver, Jack — a story in nursery rhymes with a voiceover reading the rhyme.
    It was launched in 1970 and called Jack and Jill: A Postscript . The proposition was