By Darryl Mason
Do you know who this beautiful, bronzed young man is?
What about now?
You'll have to watch The Chaser's last War On Everything tonight to find out why Chas Licciardello did this to himself, but here's the recipe for his 50% full body makeover :
Licciardello has had 34 Botox injections, eight Restylane lip injections, teeth whitening, four coats of spray tan, hair and eyebrow bleaching, and leg and chest waxing.The Botox, fat lips and tan will take up to two months to wear off.
And he did it, just to make you laugh.
The last show is easily one of their best. They saved some of their most hilariously outrageous bits for the finale. The stigmata segment is deliriously gruesome, very, very bloody. If it doesn't get cut.
At last night's taping, a few moments before the end, The Chaser team watch, on monitors, the final segment that will close the show :
(click to enlarge)
Is the final bit of the final War On Everything funny enough?
Yes, it is.
Chris Taylor said they'd pulled off something like 180 public stunts over 50-something episodes. An extraordinary amount of work, considering one gag in tonight's episode - a crowd of tourists at Circular Quay each try to get a passer-by to take "just one more photo" - chewed up an entire morning for about a minute of screen time.
While The Chaser's War On Everything ends on Australian TV tonight, outside of 11pm repeats on ABC2 (for decades to come), the best bits that are not too confusing to Americans and the British are being screened right now, in the US and England, with sales of the series rolling in from plenty of other countries around the world. For all those who attempt to claim The War On Everything was a waste of taxpayers' money, the syndication of the series and warehouse emptying DVD sales will prove the low-budget Chaser series turned out to be very profitable indeed.
Chas said they have no idea of exactly what they will do next, but whatever it is the five of them will stay together. There will be no Chaser equivalent of the KISS solo albums. At least until it's time for a violent, hate-drenched break-up, followed by years of sniping and feuding, before the inevitable reunion.
The War On Everything set just before it was dismantled :
It was a great War, lots of laughs and nobody died.
Julian Morrow has promised The Orstrahyun an interview in the next couple of weeks, a sort of look back over the four years of The Chaser. If he bails, the questions part of the interview will be conducted, in due season, through Rose Tattoo's mammothic PA, on the back of a truck, parked outside Morrow's home. At 2am. On a weeknight.
I'll have a story up here soon about the location shooting of the "Just One More Photo" gag that airs tonight.
