It’s rare that an athlete can reach the global stage in one sport, let alone two, but just a few years after representing Australia in disability rugby’s World Cup, Adam Hills is off to Italy this month to compete in the world championships for disability tennis.

Yes: this is the same Adam Hills who’s already conquered the stand-up scene in both Australia and the UK. He’s also written children’s books, made documentaries, co-owns a few restaurants and of course hosts two wildly successful TV shows, Spicks and Specks and The Last Leg. Princess Anne once presented him with an MBE. What did you get up to this week?

There’s a lot more to Hills than the “nice guy” persona he’s long been saddled with. His humour can be spiky, political, sharply critical of public figures. He even went through a shouty phase.

“I was known for a little while for doing those rants on The Last Leg,” Hills, currently in Melbourne filming a new season of Spicks and Specks, says. “What was funny about those rants was that it looked like the nice guy had finally snapped. I’d built up enough goodwill that I could finally go ‘oh this is bullshit!’ and people would go ‘oh my god, that guy just snapped!’”

He was certainly never going to travel too far down the road of the “edgy” comic, though. “When I started doing stand-up I was 19, I was living at home with my parents and I was a virgin. There was no edge to me whatsoever. I remember early on trying to put some edge in there and one of the other comics said ‘dude, just talk about what you know’.”

These days hosting two TV series means Hills splits his time between Melbourne and London. The differences between the two cities is stark. The Last Leg is huge in the UK, so much so that Channel 4 builds its entire Friday night line-up around the show. That level of fame means that in London he’s invited to enough “ridiculous things” that he can turn down offers from the royal family.

But back in Australia he lives a comfortable life with his wife and kids in Melbourne’s inner west. “London’s so fast-paced and angry and people are in your face constantly, so you’re on edge the whole time. I come back to Melbourne and I’ve still got my shoulders hunched and it takes a couple of weeks to relax.”

It’s hard to overstate how popular shows such as The Last Leg are in Britain. “They’re pretty easy to make, pretty cheap to make, and you’ve got so many people over there, so many TV stations, production companies, comedians. For a while there everyone was throwing a panel show against the wall to see if it stuck.”

He says their success partly reflects their cultural context. “For me The Last Leg is a bit like The Daily Show but for a pub culture. The idea of one person in a suit behind a desk telling you what’s what doesn’t work with British people. But watching a bunch of people sitting around having a chat, like they’re down the pub, is very British. That’s probably why panel shows are so loved over there because it feels like you’re down the pub with your mates.”

Panel shows have a decent history in Australia, too, though there have been a few more US-style suits on rotation. One of the bonus features of the format in both countries is how they fit into the larger ecosystem of comedy, introducing audiences to a wide variety of talent they can go on to see in person.

“If you’ve got a panel show you’ve got at least two or three comedians on there, possibly three or four. Even if you’re not on every week, if you make a couple of appearances per season people will come and see you live.”

It’s how Hills approaches Spicks and Specks: “We’re fully aware of the responsibility that we have to show off new talent.

“Especially during lockdowns, we thought it was a great way to get performers out of the house and give them a chance to perform again. And the series after lockdown, we thought we needed to show off new talent because these were people who hadn’t worked for the last couple of years.”

In the UK the TV industry has been struggling of late, though, which has had a knock-on effect for the rest of the ecosystem. Some of the shows that once featured an up-and-coming Adam Hills are no more, while even stayers such as The Last Leg have had to trim their seasons.

“The cost-of-living crisis hit,” Hills says. “People weren’t buying stuff which meant people weren’t advertising stuff which means channels were running out of money.”

The Australian television scene isn’t looking so grim, he says, and Spicks and Specks has benefited from a new injection of talent. They’ve brought in new writers, producers and researchers, and guests are often the cream of the next generation of comedians.

It’s not just the on-screen talent who are younger than ever. He was in a pub recently and the bartender asked when Spicks and Specks would be back on the telly.

“I was like ‘dude, you’re 19, how do you even know what Spicks and Specks is?’ He said it was the last show he was allowed to watch on ABC Kids before going to bed at night. The last two episodes that we’ve filmed, we’ve noticed that the most vocal members of the audience are 19, 20, because they’ve grown up watching this show.”

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Hill is grateful for the way that platforms such as Spotify and TikTok regularly plant older hits into the feeds of younger listeners. When he hears his 14-year-old singing along to Boney M or Billy Joel, he knows something about the way we consume music has shifted.

“It’s not just new songs that are trending. It’s a whole range of music. In a weird way, it makes it a little easier to write the show because instead of going ‘oh shit, the kids are listening to this but 40-year-olds are listening to that,’ now you just go to TikTok and go: ‘what songs are they both aware of?’”

Spicks and Specks is currently filming its latest series, and Hills will then be over to Paris to cover this year’s Paralympics for The Last Leg. In between he’ll squeeze in those matches at the disability tennis world championships, and he’ll no doubt find time for some disability rugby back in the UK: “I’m kind of obsessed by it.” His manager knows not to book him gigs on Tuesday nights – they’re for training. He even turned down an invite to Prince Charles’ 70th birthday so he wouldn’t miss a session.

He says it’s important that he does more than “comedy, comedy, comedy” all the time, but he’ll never be too far away. “I’ve got to balance it. I want to see my kids, I want to spend time with them,” he says. “But I figure as long as I’m still doing comedy, whether it’s kids’ books or TV or documentaries, as long as I’m still doing comedy then I’m being true to myself.”

Spicks and Specks returns for its 11th season at 7.30pm Sunday, June 9 on ABC.