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The Chaser
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Chaser is a satirical Australian enterprise, most famous for their television programmes on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Chaser originated as a satirical newspaper which was known to push the limits as to what it published and for enacting its mission statement, "striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence".
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The original core of The Chaser team were the founding editors of the newspaper: Charles Firth, Dominic Knight, Julian Morrow and Craig Reucassel who all came from the University of Sydney. They were later joined by Chas Licciardello, Chris Taylor and Andrew Hansen. James Edwards designed The Chaser logo and is the Video Editor of the current television series.
Other founding contributors to the team include Gregor Stronach, Johanna Featherstone, Sholto Macpherson, David Stewart and Arion McNicoll. Later contributors include Kara Greiner, Richard Cooke, Shane Cubis and Tim Brunero. Cartoonists Fiona Katauskas and Andrew Weldon drew for the newspaper from its early days.
The newspaper, first published in 1999, was The Chaser team's most famous (or infamous) enterprise. Among other things, they have published Australian Prime Minister John Howard's private, unlisted home phone number on their front page, which caused wide controversy. Apparently the phone number was sent to one of the writers by SMS and they sat on it for a while, until the opportunity to use it came up when John Howard ignored anti-war protests[1]. The Chaser only had a limited fan base, with the average sales numbers per issue well under 30,000. But when their newspaper was shown as a lead story in all major Australian news broadcasts, not only was the headline widely spread, but the concept and the popularity of the newspaper leaped dramatically.
The Chaser has also published an annual each year since 2000 featuring many articles and columns from the newspaper and website. In August 2006, a compilation volume of the six previous editions, 50 Golden Years Of The Chaser, was released. The 2006 Annual was released in November 2006.
The Election Chaser was the team's first television programme, covering the Australian Federal Elections of 2001. The Chaser team have gone on to create other television shows for ABC TV, including the Logie Award winning CNNNN in 2002-3 and The Chaser Decides in 2004. CNNNN was a satire of not only the popular news network CNN, but also cleverly incorporated Australian and world current affairs into the programme. It inspired a similar programme covering the 2004 election, The Chaser Decides. The coverage, as with all the Chaser productions, was satirical, but a different view on the way the election was covered by the local media.
In 2004-5 Taylor and Reucassel hosted the Triple J radio drive programme, Today Today. In 2005 the rest of the team produced Chaser News Alert (CNA), aired on ABC2. Episodes of this series were only a few minutes long.
In March 2005 as part of the Sydney Big Laugh comedy festival [2], The Chaser team launched an 85-minute stage show named 'Cirque du Chaser' (the name is a parody of Cirque du Soleil) to sellout audiences. It was originally intended to have seven shows, but due to popular demand an eighth show was added at short notice. The show contained similar material to the Chaser's TV shows including political satire and humorous commentary on topical events.
Cirque du Chaser also appeared at the Adelaide cabaret festival [3] in June 2005.
Due to the success of these shows, The Chaser team took Cirque du Chaser on a national tour, visiting Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra during September and October 2005.
On 10 August 2005, The Chaser team filmed a pilot episode of a new TV show for the ABC, tentatively named "Hey Hey, It's the Chaser" (in reference to Nine Network show Hey Hey It's Saturday). The new pilot was in much the same vein as The Chaser team's previous TV shows and Cirque du Chaser. Filmed in front of a studio audience, the show contained mostly new material as well as some ideas taken from the stage show.
This variety-show approach was scrapped and was replaced with the same new content but in a different format, now titled The Chaser's War on Everything. It began airing 17 February 2006 at 9.45pm.
The series was directed by Mark FitzGerald (studio director), Bradley Howard and Craig Melville (location directors). Aside from the Chaser team appearing on screen, other writers were Lawrence Leung, Shane Cubis and Kara Kidman.
A DVD featuring the first 13 episodes of The War on Everything was released on the 17 August 2006. A second DVD was released in November 2006, concluding the first season.
The Chaser's War on Everything returned for a second season on Wednesday March 28, 2007 at 9pm, moving from their Friday night timeslot.
During Dick Cheney's visit to Australia in 2007, The Chaser team were included on the official list of terrorists, anarchists and protesters deemed to pose a threat to the US Vice-President. [4]