UPDATE: Already labelled as 'The Photo Of The Election Campaign', photographer Alex Ellinghausen captures Tony Abbott as he would like to be seen by the Australian public, on his bike with his crotch pouring light. Probably.
Campaign Gets Ruddy Bloody - After months of unemployment and general beardiness, The Chaser team pick up some top shaving tips from prime minister Kevin Rudd as they begin work on their election specials.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
The Chaser Vs The Royals : We Are Definitely Not Amused
The office of Prince Charles and Prince William forced the ABC to pull a planned live commentary TV broadcast of the 2011 Royal Wedding last night
This is one of the clips that saw an unprecedented act of censorship by representatives of the future king of Australia. Note, all Prince Phillip quotes used are based on things he has actually said :
Clarence House, the almost 200-year-old London royal residence which doubles as an office for the Prince of Wales and his son, Prince William, demanded the ABC cancel plans to use the controversial comedy group, the Chaser, as royal wedding commentators.
They then contacted broadcast suppliers, including the host BBC, Associated Press Television News (APTN), Sky and ITN, to ensure the ABC would have no access to footage if it ignored the request.
Faced with the prospect of airing static for almost four hours tomorrow night, the ABC had no choice but to capitulate.
This is a letter The Chaser sent to The Queen :
Dear Australian Head of State,
We would like to place ourselves at your mercy and request a stay of execution for our television program, The Chaser's Royal Wedding Commentary.
We, like Kate, are commoners, and were looking forward to celebrating her wedding to your exalted grandson with a few affectionate observations.
To ensure that our coverage was respectful, we were only planning to use jokes that Prince Phillip has previously made in public, or at least the ones that don't violate racial vilification laws. We've also filmed a joke about hunting grouse which we think you might enjoy.
We Australians are a simple people who don't often get to watch that kind of pomp. The last big wedding we had here was Scott and Charlene on Neighbours. We've asked around, and there are at least six people in this outpost of your empire who would quite like to watch our commentary.
Please consider our plea.
We have the honour to be, Madam, Your Majesty's humble and obedient servants,
Cheers,
The Chaser
PS: How serious are you about treason laws?
Yes, The Royal Family wields absolutely no power at all over what happens in Australia.
Well, except for using blackmail to censor live TV mockery.
A few more pre-filmed clips from the canceled royal wedding special The Chaser are now only allowed to air on YouTube :
As you may already be aware, The Chaser returns to the ABC tonight for the first of five new episodes covering the Federal Election 2010, a year on from the end of their War On Everything series.
Yes We Canberra! will likely be the most, or only, entertaining thing about the next four weeks of campaigning, leading to the day Tony Abbott is declared the new prime minister of Australia.
In preparation for a Liberal Party-led new government, Chas takes on the next Australian deputy prime minister, Julie Bishop, in a deathstare cagematch :
After the June coup, The Chaser had to dump a ton of sketches and gags they'd been working on, centred around prime minister Kevin Rudd on the campaign trail. Here's one of the Rudd gags that didn't get the chop :
Friday, June 25, 2010
Haunting :
Sunday, May 16, 2010
The Chaser on Kevin Rudd, three years ago :
Maybe Kevin needs a theme song? It worked for Gough Whitlam (he was a pre-internet, pre-colour TV Australian prime minister who, by the rapturous, near religious-like, frenzy of dancing, chanting and clapping on display below was seen to be God-like by some of his followers) :
Baby Boomers were so much funnier when they were young.
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Chaser's new book is now available. With a very timely cover indeed.
I do still have a story on The Chaser coming, focusing on producer/writer/performer Julian Morrow's quest to come up with a new TV show format that will go beyond anything they've done so far, but will not go down the predictable route of easy outrage. As he put it in a recent speech, how easy is it to offend conservatives? Too easy. He doesn't sound interested at all in heading back into that territory.
The story I've been writing is long, getting onto 8000 words, and I think I'll break it up into three parts.
Part One will focus on the shooting of one of their last big public gags (the "One More Picture" bit that aired in the final show).
Part Two will focus on the interview I did with Morrow, the recording of the final show, and what happened at the after party.
Part Three will focus on the speeches Morrow has given since The Chaser's War On Everything ended, and his feelings about what the the War On Everything achieved, where they failed, and what they might be getting up to next.
So thanks for being patient, and I'm sorry it's taken so long.
I hope to get Part One up late next week.
Feel free to post abuse in comments if I miss this hazy deadline.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
ABC Gets More Complaints About The Chaser Than Its Alleged Bias
As a testament to the extraordinary power of The Chaser to generate MoralOutrage! controversy, according to the below story from The Age, the show also pulled the most complaints in 2008, even though The War On Everything was taking a year off.
The guerilla comedy program attracted a total of 4995 complaints....4286 of which were in relation to the Make a Realistic Wish Foundation sketch that featured children with terminal illnesses.
That featured actors portraying children with terminal illnesses.
ABC copped 32.130 complaints in the year, but only around 10 per cent of those complaints were for "bias." There are no breakdowns to reveal how many of those "bias" complaints came from Gerard Henderson, or readers of Andrew "World Government!" Bolt. You'd assume many.
And Ari Sharp reminds readers of a crucial fact to keep in mind the next time you hear endless bitching about "that's my bloody 10 cents a day they're spending so John Safran can snog a hot Swede!"
Newspoll found that 89 per cent of people value the broadcaster and its services to the community, up 1 percentage point, while those who believe quality programming offered by ABC television was steady at 82 per cent...
Remind commenters at certain other blogs of those stats the next time you see them whining about how the ABC "doesn't give Australians what they want!" or some other fringe minority grievance.
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Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Apparently, the botox doctor who did this to half of The Chaser's Chas Licciardello's face....
If you're a fan of The Chaser, and you were wondering how Chas is getting on a couple of weeks after dyeing one side of his hair blonde, and getting a half face full of botox, so 50% of him would look like Daniel Craig, well, wonder no more :
If you spent the mornings of your early school years in the 1970s getting dressed and breakfasted in a household in suburban Sydney, you very likely endured hearing John Laws' voice gruffing through the house most mornings.
Even at five years old, it was easy to know that John Laws was an arsehole.
The former king of Australian radio did a lot of great charity work during his five decades on air, he often counselled elderly, lonely people, but he also spent a lot of his time shouting at those who bothered to call in, abusing them, humiliating them. He incited racism and intolerance. His shows could often be extremely nasty and vindictive. But he was king. He could call anyone whatever he wanted, and he did. It's good to be the king.
That was then.
Now? John Laws is retired, and clearly bored. He decided to zero in on a recent comment made by Melbourne talk radio's Neil Mitchell, where he supposedly called Laws "an idiot" and someone who had clearly been involved in "grubby" behaviour, particularly during the Cash For Comments scandal. Laws called into Mitchell's program to demand an apology.
Mitchell didn't have to induce Laws into humiliating himself live on air. The former "Golden Tonsils" provided a pre-full-dementia self-demolition as he struggled to comprehend how anyone could think he'd ever done anything wrong. Ever.
If Laws had not treated so many people so abominably, for so many years, it would be quite sad to hear this old man - who was a hero just about every male neighbour, relative or school teacher, over 30, that I encountered during my childhood - struggling to remember what he said only a minute or two before.
By the end of the conversation, Laws seems to understand what a fool he has just made of himself. Neil Mitchell clearly gave the presumably near-senile Laws ample opportunities to get out of the embarrassing phone call, but Laws kept going, to the point where he actually started whining and threatening legal action.
And yet, two years ago, during the following Media Watch exchange, Laws seemed all but completely on top of his game in justifying himself, despite believing that accepting money to praise corporations on air that he had only recently criticised - cash for comments - was not deceiving his listeners.
Another lesson from this: if you’re a news media figure who has a prominent platform in the national debate, and you start threatening people with defamation, you look like a complete and utter hypocrite and buffoon. You become an object of mockery and derision. You lose professional credibility.
Look at how idiotic Laws sounded when he tried the stunt. A fearless crusader for truth, threatening to UNLEASH THE LAWYERS because someone called him a mean name?
The Chaser's take on John Laws :
Another icon of the John Howard generation stumbles and falls, stripped of his power. He won't be the last.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The End Of The War...The Funny One, Anyway
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.
Guide Dogs Queensland chief executive Chris Laine said her organisation had received a number of complaints from offended clients and had passed them on to ABC management and The Chaser team.
Ms Laine said of particular concern was the episode's title and the "incorrect and debasing suggestion that guide dogs can be used to accommodate irresponsible and drunken behaviour".
"In doing this skit, the Chasers have not only offended and degraded the work and dedication of guide dog schools around the world, but also the courage and commitment shown everyday by the many clients who use a guide dog."
I think the many blind people who have to tolerate fuckwits coming up to them pissed out of their minds shouting, "Hey, I'm so ratshit I need a guide dog, too! Hah hah ha!" would have understood what The Chaser were aiming for.
But this reaction, like that surrounding The Chaser's spluttering outrage-inciting skit about dying children asking for wishes beyond a charity's budget, helps to explain why Australian TV comedy is generally quite boring. It's been tamed. Whipped into submission.
I'm not quite sure what satire is supposed to be if it doesn't sometimes cause offence and disgust along with the laughs. Or because of the laughs. Do you really want to see satirical television that only allows you to laugh at that which you already think is funny?
Anyway, you'd think if anyone was going to be offended, it would be footpath-weaving drunks : "You shittiizh, I dun need no freakuning Dog! to get me..........Home! fukuuuzall. I cun walk it....bastards....watch me! lookit I'm walkun straighhht...ow, stupid pole."
The Chaser's War On Everything has one episode left to go.
Has The Chaser team gone soft? That's the burning question after last night's edition of The War on Everything.
The Chaser boys - Andrew Hansen, Chas Licciardello, Julian Morrow, Craig Reucassel and Chris Taylor - looked tentative after being thrown off air by the ABC for two weeks.
He wasn't watching too closely, perhaps distracted by the State Of Origin :
A much-publicised dig at the Moran family didn’t make it to air.
The Moran family dig did air, it was fast and close to the start.
So where does The Chaser go from here? The world has changed a lot in the two years since the team’s last series. Reliable Chaser targets John Howard and George Bush are long gone.
Fear and cynicism have been replaced by a renewed sense of hope and positivity.
Masterchef Australia is held up by Vickery as an example of Australia's "renewed sense of hope and positivity", in the mostly fictional lands of reality TV at least.
A clearly chastened Chaser took aim at some easy targets in last night’s show in an obvious attempt to ensure there was no repeat of the firestorm of protest that came after their Make A Realistic Wish Foundation sketch.
The Herald Sun, and all the online Murdoch tabloids, including The Australia, quite profitably whipped up much of that "Firestorm Of Protest" with a series of Colin Vickery stories that delivered hundreds of thousands of extra page views and thousands of comments over the three or four days they managed to keep the Chaser Makes Fun Of Dying Children sensation alive.
The Murdoch media, like Fairfax, don't just forget about The Chaser because they're not doing anything controversial when stories about them pull so many readers to the news sites. Chaser stories can be almost constantly counted on to feature in the Top Ten Most Read Today lists.
All through the past few years, controversies whipped up, sometimes furiously, by the Murdoch media has resulted in literally hundreds of Chaser stories being published across the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, The Australian, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Courier Mail, in print and online. This list of stories from the past two years or so would have generated many millions of page views and tens of thousands of comments. Massive traffic, monumental. And profitable.
You usually need to fake stories about Pauline Hanson getting her tits out to pull those numbers.
The Chaser delivers bigger profit as free content to the Murdoch online media than it delivers to the show's creators and producers through DVD sales.
When you're onto a good thing, Rupert Murdoch would expect you to milk the fucker for everything you can get.
So Colin Vickery had no choice, he had to come up with something Chaser-related.
Even as something as damp and 'aaaahh, whatever' as asking if The Chaser has "finally gone soft".
UPDATE : Herald Sun readers notice the obvious schizophrenia, 95% of commenters point out the blinding hypocrisy.
The Chasers' Wingdings message from last night's very fast, very tight, very fit show has been decoded :
If you actually bothered to translate this you are :
a) clearly unemployed
b) clearly a nerd
c) clearly disappointed by now that it's nothing controversial.
It was familiar of The Simpsons episode where a fast-scrolling list of official apologies from the producers of Kent Brockman's Eye On Springfield whips by. It required hitting slo-mo on the non-digital video recorder when it was originally aired back in the non-YouTube 1990s to catch all the apologies, such as these :
The nerds on the Internet are not geeks.
Our universities are not "hotbeds" of anything.
Cats do not eventually turn into dogs.
The "Bug" on your TV screen can see into your home.
Our viewers are not pathetic sexless food tubes.
In amongst those apologies was this line :
If You're Reading This, You Have No Life
Last night The Chaser dared to air another skit videod on location outside The Vatican. This, like the messasge blimp, featured controversial material.
However, you won't hear representatives of The Catholic Church trying to tear in The Chaser this time. Because to do so means critics and the professionally outraged will have to acknowledge what the piece was about.
The Catholic Church has added 'Excessive Wealth' to its expanded list of The Seven Deadly Sins. So The Chaser asked passing Vatican priests to pray for those suffering from Excessive Wealth, like The Catholic Church, which we learned through the prayers pulls an astounding $15 billion in revenue from Australia each year and $4 trillion from around the world.
You can catch the latest Chaser episode here, including the highlight Ray Martin's Small Talk, where Tim Flannery and Phillip Ruddock convene to discuss, well, not very much at all. I wanted to see more of this small talk, I think I could take about fifteen minutes of it, just before bed.
Who knew Ray Martin could parody himself so effortlessly?
The Chaser's bit about the 'Rudd Safe House', where shattered, trembling ex-staffers of the prime minister can recover and heal safely was good, but they still have a long way to go in getting at Kevin Rudd in the sometimes near hallucinatory ways they got at John Howard in 2006 and 2007 :
....the Chasers, a constant thorn in the then prime minister's side as the election approached. Some of their ambushes of his early morning power walks rose to the level of performance art - one involved a silver Delorean sports car, a mad professor and the promise to take Mr Howard "back to the future" so that he could retire gracefully rather than be forced out by the voters.
The BBC has picked The Chaser to air before the well-matched and already popular Flight Of The Conchords. Getting picked up by the BBC is still a kind of comedy nirvana :
The BBC signed a deal to screen a special six-episode compilation of highlights from The Chaser's War On Everything 2006 and 2007 seasons.
The show is already screening in America, Japan, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, Israel and even Mongolia...
Saturday, June 06, 2009
The Chaser Is Not "The Media", You Morons
By Darryl Mason
Australia's most boring columnist, Gerard Henderson, has long thought satirical ABC show The Chaser is not comedy television but "The Media".
Incredibly, the editor of The Australian now also thinks The Chaser is "the media". No, really. He does. The editor of The Australian newspaper can't tell the difference between A Current Affair and a comedy show full of made-up nonsense and occasionally cutting social and political satire. He thinks The Chaser, like 2GB or the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian is part of "The Media"and so therefore must be hammered by the ABC's Media Watch :
For weeks, Media Watch, the in-house organ of the ABC's opinion makers, has bagged management over a broadcast computer system that is slow to settle in. But now presenter Jonathan Holmes and his team have a superior scandal they can chase hard next Monday night - The Chaser's dour and disgraceful sketch that mocked the wishes of dying children and the people who love them.
Then again, maybe it's easy for the editor of The Australian to confuse The Chaser with real "media". After all, The Chaser has covered the Iraq War, and the 'War on Terror', over the years, with a savage honesty that The Australian shied completely away from.
Plus, The Chaser did once have a newspaper.
And so The Chaser caved in, or were likely forced to, and just like The Glass House and The Gruen Transfer before it, the show will now fall under a new regime of increased censorship because people were upset by their reaction to a show that implicitly aims to provoke a reaction in a television era filled with the drab, the unchallenging, the politically correct, the grindingly bland.
The Chaser are clearly not happy about what's happened :
We want to make an apology for a sketch we created called “The Make a Realistic Wish Foundation”.
We’ve just heard from the ABC that they’re suspending the show for 2 weeks. We were keen to keep making the show, so we’re disappointed by the decision, and we don’t agree with it.
But that aside, we’d like to apologise. The piece was a very black sketch. Obviously too black. And we’re really sorry for the significant pain and anger we have caused.
Many people have asked how could we possibly think a sketch like that should go to air. We realize in hindsight that we shouldn’t have done it. We never imagined that the sketch would be taken literally.
We don’t think sick kids are greedy and we don’t think the Make a Wish Foundation deserves anything other than praise. It was meant to be so over-the-top that no one would ever take it seriously.
But we now understand the sketch didn’t come across as intended, and we take full responsibility for that. Now we’ve seen the impact of the piece we wish we’d thought it through better. There was no value in it that justifies the impact it’s clearly had on people whose grief or trauma is so great already. We should have considered that. We got it wrong. We’re sorry.
We'll be making no further comment at this time.
What else is there to say?
The Chaser's audience wanted 'The Boys' to keep pushing the limits of what they may or may not find funny, just how far 'The Boys' would be willing to go, for a laugh or a reaction, or something beyond the reaction most watch television with, a nonchalant 'Eh.'
Now The Chaser has most definitely found out what that limit is.
Dying Children.
Well, at least actors playing dying children.
Not so long ago, Australians could tell the difference.
No Matter How Far They Go, The Mainstream Media Will Never Campaign To Have The Chaser Taken Off The Air
By Darryl Mason
The Chaser's Julian Morrow made a promise on May 28, after the first episode of the new series of the mainstream media's reliable 'Public Outrage!' content provider, and comments generator, went to air :
"We care about complaint numbers far more than ratings. We were disappointed there were so few complaints this week, so we'll try to make it worse next week,'' Morrow said.
The Chaser kept its promise :
The complaints are pouring into the ABC, but more importantly, so are the comments to mainstream media blogs, your says and discussion boards. There must be 3000 comments already across a dozen or so Murdoch media blogs and news stories.
The Chaser made fun of dying children, or at least made fun of the way dying children are marketed by charities and top rating commercial television shows. Who the fuck doesn't have an opinion on that?
The Chaser's 'Make A Realistic Wish' Outrage! will soar to the top of Most Read stories across all the mainstream media online news sites, generating hundreds of thousands of extra page views, and by the time the Public Outrage! dies down, a few million in total page views that never would have existed had not The Chaser asked what's the point of helping dying children? "They're only going to die anyway."
A one minute skit from The Chaser produces a free video story, and copious online news stories mostly built out of comments made online by parents of dying children and furious others demanding the ABC cancel The Chaser by dinner time. This is not a costly piece of investigative journalism. It's all free. But it's exactly the kind of free Public Outrage! news story the mainstream media, tabloid and 'serious', are quickly becoming addicted to.
A few million extra page views, thanks to The Chaser, for online mainstream media new sites, translates into, at least, thousands of dollars worth of extra ad revenue.
The figures get bigger when you take it to the commercial television networks who will fill a few minutes of the evening news with this story, which will also soak up a solid five to eight minutes of the evening current affairs shows. Again, free Public Outrage! content.
It will be interesting to see who actually interviews dying children first to see what they think of The Chaser's demand they be more realistic about their dying wishes. Maybe A Current Affair can follow Julian Morrow around with a couple of cancer kids until he breaks down and weeps an apology.
If The Chaser can be relied upon to keep delivering totally free Public Outrage! stories every week for the rest of their last series, and no doubt they can (and if they don't, there will be enough material for some confected Public Outrage! anyway), mainstream media news sites, and blogs, can expect increased ad revenue because advertisers know The Chaser-related stories will pull the online eyeballs that they want to reach. It's not often a newspaper or news site can count on a popular story being served up to them for free, every Wednesday night.
Interestingly, if say the Daily Telegraph, an obvious online ad revenue beneficiary from The Chasers's totally free Public Outrage! stories, decided to go hard and stop at nothing until The Chaser was pulled off air, and got the rest of the series canned, they would be kissing goodbye to thousands of dollars worth of extra page view/ad revenue, plus all those stories that feed the endless demand for new semi-news related content. (Note : I'm basing those very loose ad revenue estimates on what those kind of page view numbers would generate for the average independent blog carrying Google ads. I'd expect the money generated by The Chaser's free Public Outrage! stories to be substantially greater).
Clearly it would not be in the interest of any of the mainstream media online news sites, or the evening news or current affairs shows, to actually have The Chaser pulled off the air, no matter how far they go.
So in the time they have left, eight to ten weeks, in this final series, The Chaser can do anything they want, within legal restrictions. They could do some of the most dark and demented satire Australian TV viewers have ever seen. They could really break out of their own worn-out format and do something utterly unhinged.
The Chaser is clearly invaluable to all the Australian media. What they do generates public discussion and debate, filling newspaper pages, dreary day empty evening news spots, comment boards, and all those hours of talkback radio.
The first episode of the new series of The Chaser also provided hundreds of thousands of extra page views and free Public Outrage! content and online comment for the commercial TV networks and the Fairfax and Murodch media :
The public broadcaster received complaints about almost every segment of the satirical ABC show, which set its sights on making fun of the Cronulla Sharks group sex scandal.
The Chaser's War On Everything spokesman said complaint words used included: ``Disgusting, cruel, offensive, pathetic, revolting and disgraceful''.
It also showed the incident in which the boys flew a blimp into protected airspace above the Vatican, a cameo by TV talk show host Kerri-Anne Kennerley in a romantic tryst with Morrow.
Morrow also featured in a skit where a mannequin dressed as Governor General Quentin Bryce was thrown over a wall of the all-male Melbourne Club.
Some said a Footprints sketch was offensive to Christians, while a Wipeout Palestine segment and Billy Connolly sketch were also complained about.
Many more took to websites to express their disappointment with the show which has been off-air for 18 months.
While I don't doubt that many, many people were seriously offended and upset by the 'Make A Realistic Wish Foundation' bit, you also have to wonder, in these remaining days of anonymous commenting, just how busy the PR units of rival networks are in creating or at least adding to the avalanche of comments demanding The Chaser be taken off the air, immediately. Consider this :
An average national audience of 1.54 million watched the show last night.
It smashed its commercial rivalsCriminal Minds, The Mentalist and Law and Order: SVU.
It's not just that The Chaser completely dominates its prime time position, advertisers are reluctant to pay what they once did for 30 seconds in Law & Order because they know nearly all of their key target audience of 16 to 35 year olds are watching The Chaser.
The commercial networks, however, could go hard against The Chaser and air something that would pull away probably half of The Chaser's audience. The latest episode of The Daily Show for example. Or The Trailer Park Boys. But to air those shows in prime time, the commercial networks would have to become as subversive as The Chaser, and they won't be doing that anytime soon.
It's going to be interesting to see what they came up with. Easy to recognise on the streets of Australia, The Chaser team were forced to shoot dozens of new skits and pranks in locations scattered around the world.
After The Chaser boys completed some pre-new show publicity over The Vatican, Gerard Henderson unfurls a troubling little fantasy he has about what would happen, and how the ABC would respond, if The Chaser "Boys" tried to pull that kind of shit somewhere Islamic :
“The Chaser shoot was approved by ABC TV. Not all the Chaser boys got their throats cut in the resultant mob violence. Fortunately, one of The Boys was pretending to urinate in a Tehran toilet fixture display store at the time and escaped injury. He has our full support. We are certainly sad that two of The Boys did not make it safely home. But the return of The Boys’ coffins will provide an opportunity at gallows humour to match the 2007 skit by The Boy Licciardello aimed at the disabled in wheel-chairs.”
I hope Gerard wasn't touching himself inappropriately while conjuring up that fascinating little fantasy.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
The Chaser Responds To Liberal Party's Pro-Terrorism "Chaser-Style Prank"
Citing The Chaser as a way of trying to defuse the growing scandal and outrage over the fake Labor Party leaflet, detailed here, was the second big mistake retiring Liberal Party MP Jackie Kelly made, after laughing about it on morning radio and television.
She has made sure the scandal stays in the headlines right through to Saturday. Unless something, or someone, explodes.
Jackie Kelly tried to defend her husband, Gary Clark, when he was busted on Tuesday night stuffing pro-terrorism leaflets, plastered with Labor Party logos, into Western Sydney letterboxes by claiming he was "drunk" and was attempting "a Chaser-style prank."
The Chaser's executive producer Julian Morrow has now invited Ms Kelly, who will retire after the election, to join the comedy team.
"Jackie will obviously be looking for a job," Morrow said.
"One of the criticisms of The Chaser is that we don't have any women on our team.
"Bronwyn Bishop has got the inside running, but Jackie is welcome to make an application."
"It's a bit of a worry when the best argument you have to defend your ethical practices is that you were doing what The Chaser does.
"We are hoping this will lead to a profitable political consultancy for The Chaser in the future."
We'll update later with the raft of questions John Howard is expected to be hammered with during his press club final speech, and pitch, to the nation.
Howard must be ready to cry to have such a disgusting and incredibly stupid scandal erupt so close to voting day.
The final nail in Howard's political coffin has come from his own people.
