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This month marks 20 years since The Chaser’s War on Everything premiered on the ABC. Starring Craig Reucassel, Chas Licciardello, Chris Taylor, Julian Morrow and Andrew Hansen, the satire became a hit, generating headlines for its controversial sketches, songs and run-ins with Seven’s current affairs program Today Tonight. In 2006, it won the AFI award for best comedy program, and in 2009, it was the most complained about program on the ABC. It ended that same year, after 58 episodes. Reucassel and Licciardello spoke with national TV editor Louise Rugendyke about the show, including their most controversial stunt, their favourite politician – and whom they apologised to.
Hello Craig and Chas! What was the idea behind The War on Everything? You had already done a few election specials and CNNNN.
CR: If you actually look at it, [The War on Everything] has no idea behind it. It has no structure. There’s no point to it. That is because we all have very different senses of humour. So it was able to do anything.
CL: There were two ideas behind The War on Everything. One was to come up with a format that wasn’t a format, so that way we could resolve our internal arguments. And the second was to relive our childhood. Most of us [in the team] were big fans of The Late Show when we were teenagers and we wanted to rip it off without actually ripping it off.
CR: My parents wouldn’t let me watch The Late Show…
CL: It was a great success because the D-Generation [The Late Show’s creators] never sued us.
Were you ever given limits by the ABC or told not to do something? Or were you just given carte blanche?
CR: It’s definitely not carte blanche. Everything you saw on the TV went through lawyers. And the amazing thing about it, I found, was that, generally speaking, they wouldn’t say no. They’d say, “Well, if you did it this way, you might be able to get away with it.” I mean, APEC [the 2007 summit in Sydney that featured international leaders, including then US president George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin] is probably a great example.
CL: That’s the classic. Going into APEC, people were neurotic about what we were going to do, and the only people who didn’t seem to worry about that was us because we had no ideas. The ABC asked us, “We want to legally consider what you’re going to do.” We had no ideas, so we tried to bluff them. And they thought we were being cagey. So they said, “We’ll get you a security consultant to make sure what you’re doing is legal and won’t hurt you.” So, as soon as the legal consultant comes in, we go, “Give us some ideas, mate.”
CR: It was only a bit of a throwaway line [from the consultant] – “The only way you’ll get away with this is if you’re in a motorcade” – and I think Julian [Morrow] picked up on that. [The sketch] was built around the idea that we weren’t going to get through [security], that’s why Chas was dressed as Osama bin Laden, [it was] “We’re not going to get through, so we need a gag at the end.”
CL: Originally, we were going to do three other things, and “Osama bin Laden” was going to not get in via various methods…
CR: We didn’t need to do the other methods in the end because everyone was arrested.
(The stunt involved a fake Canadian motorcade that was allowed into the restricted area in Sydney’s CBD. After they were waved through two security checkpoints, Licciardello hopped out of the car, dressed as Bin Laden, and complained he hadn’t been invited to APEC. The Australian Federal Police then arrested all 11 cast and crew. They were charged with entering a restricted area, but the charges were eventually dropped.)
CR: When Julian knocks on the window and gets Chas to get out, Chas clearly thinks that this thing has been a blowout, so he gets out and just wanders off. We were incredibly lucky because if Chas had done his normal thing, which is to overreact – sorry, overact – and run around like a fool, he was directly under the building where there were snipers for George W. Bush. We have been told by several people in the security fraternity since then, that that was an incredibly lucky thing because snipers despise overacting.
CL: In all seriousness, the ABC didn’t need to place boundaries on us because the world placed boundaries on us, especially when it got to the second season of The War on Everything. We weren’t scared about the ABC saying no to an idea. If we were scared about anything, it was about ending up on the front page of the paper because we were being hunted by the tabloid media, by people with mobile phones just following us around, by the fact our bodies could only take so much punishment.
CR: I disagree with him. I think we loved getting on the front page of the paper.
Did that change the way you approached the show, knowing you were being followed by the media?
CR: It became harder. When we started, it was kind of a late night show and then, by the time we got to APEC, that episode had more than 2 million people watching it. Chas and Andrew [Hansen] were in a full-time battle with Today Tonight and A Current Affair, so it did become harder because the anonymity had been a key part of what we did.
Did you ever feel in danger?
CL: People see APEC and see moments like that, and they go, “Oh, wow, that looks really dangerous.” If it was really dangerous, it wouldn’t be on TV. The really dangerous stuff never gets near the air. I was doing a stunt where the concept was that since in pubs they replaced all the bands with pokies, we were replacing buskers with pokies. So we’re going up to buskers – they weren’t professional singers – with a pokie and acting very rude in trying to replace them, right? Because you always try and be as rude as possible to try and create the comedy, and one pulled out a knife and held it to my throat.
Craig, you often followed politicians around, how much pushback did you get from their security?
CR: The Federal Police were actually pretty wonderful, and particularly under John Howard. Despite the fact we would chase him with DeLorean cars, I took a giant bus and followed him on his walk one day, we were always dressed as idiots. He didn’t like us, but he had this weird respect, like, this is part of a democracy. So he wouldn’t shut us down. When we then tried some of these stunts overseas – I dressed as Barney the Dinosaur outside Dick Cheney’s house – the FBI turned up and searched our hotel room, and when we did a stunt outside Buckingham Palace, they lost their shit.
CL: The most rabid security we encountered overseas was not the New York Police, and it was not the Buckingham Palace guys with the submachine guns, it was the Vatican police. Those guys were rabid.
CR: I got arrested flying a blimp over the Vatican. We got taken in, kept in custody for a while, then taken to some kind of outlying jail with all these immigrants that were arrested as well, which was a little bit of a worrying time.
Oh god. Was it worth it?
CR: The bizarre thing about that, the Vatican stunt was that it wasn’t a particularly good piece of TV. The behind-the-scenes was a great story. The piece on the TV was not that great.
Did you have a favourite politician to interact with?
CR: There were often shocks as to how people responded. The weirdest transition was Tony Abbott. For the first several stunts we did to him, he would always ignore us and blank us and walk away, and he would always look terrible. And I don’t know if somebody took him aside and said something to him, but then he started engaging. And actually had some really witty lines.
CL: I was very surprised by how sweet-tempered Philip Ruddock was. I was expecting him to be Emperor Palpatine [from Star Wars] personified, but he’s just a lovely guy. The other one that always surprised me – once again, in hindsight, less of a surprise – was how allergic to us Kevin Rudd became as soon as he became the opposition leader. He was getting the Feds [AFP] to get in the way, which was the direct opposite of what John Howard used to do. Rudd was getting them to faux arrest us so he could get away, and then they’d let us go.
Does it feel like that was like the wild west of TV? Do you think we’ll ever get back to television like that again? It all feels pretty bland these days.
CR: I don’t know. It really was unique. A lot of the kind of comedy that we do, nowadays people say, “Oh, it’s nowhere”, but a lot of that kind of stuff is probably online and on YouTube. So to have it happening on a broadcaster, it was before everyone had moved off broadcasters.
CL: I agree with Craig, TV isn’t the place where that kind of thing would happen. I feel like we were of our time as well. That was a period when people were very, very cynical, and there was a very anything-goes vibe in culture. I mean, there’s been a backlash to that since then, where lots of people have gone, “Well, no, that doesn’t go and that doesn’t go.” I’m sure it will come around again. I think there’s going to be another bunch of people doing this in five years’ time, for sure.
Do you have any regrets over anything you did?
CR: I mean, the Make-a-Wish sketch [in which children playing terminally ill patients were told their wishes were excessive]. The regret is not that we made the sketch. The regret is that we didn’t get it right, and so many people misunderstood what we were doing. But that wasn’t their fault, that was our fault. We were certainly not trying to harm that community. So that was a mistake.
CL: I don’t regret Make A Wish at all. I mean, I agree that we didn’t quite nail the sketch, from a sketch-writing perspective, but the reaction was ridiculous compared to the sin.
That was when the show was suspended for two weeks?
CL: Yeah, for our own safety.
CR: We had death threats and we had to move my son out of his room.
CL: There were people outside my house, it was a nasty period. But what I regret was something that wasn’t controversial at all, and in fact, a lot of people will regard as one of our high points. But to me, it was a real low point, and I have huge regret, and that is, I think we went way too hard on [Today Tonight host] Naomi Robson. Look, going at her for being a vacuous, simulacrum of a journalist, sure, that’s fine, but we went personal. If you look back, we made a lot of Botox jokes, a lot of how-she-looked jokes.
CR: We turned up to the Logies that year in the Naomi Robson make-up truck.
CL: And everyone loved it because we were bashing the bad guy. But she was a human being. I apologised to her privately, and she was very gracious about accepting the apology. That’s the thing which I really wish I could go back and change because I felt awful about that. I bet she hated it, and she dealt with it with class.
Would you do it all again? You both have very sensible day jobs now, with Craig hosting Breakfast on ABC Sydney radio, and Chas co-hosting Planet America.
CR: I would do it again. I still do stunts in my [War on Waste] documentaries, but I don’t think we’re the right people to do the next War on Everything right now. I’d like it to be the next generation. It was the freedom and idiocy of youth that allowed us to pull off as many things as we did.
CL: If I was 25, I’d do it again. But I just don’t think it’s the role of middle-aged men to run around semi-naked and try and act like they’re rebels. That would be pathetic.
Planet America is on 9.35pm on Mondays on the ABC.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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