The Chaser Report - Ange Lavoipierre on spiders

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Charles and Dom chat with the hilarious Ange Lavoipierre in today’s Chaser Report: Afternoon Edition! Ange talks about her podcast “The Signal”, her new show “Spiders Follow Me”, and everyone takes turns telling their own spider-y stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Welcome to the second ever after an edition of The Chaser Report. Charles Worth and Dom Knight here, and we're going to build our journalistic credibility today. Oh, really? Yes. That's a terrible mistake. We have a competitor in the house. We have Angela Vapier.

She's one of the hosts of the Signal podcast at the ABC. It's a credible, serious daily news podcast, and it's exactly the kind of vibe we've been missing from this show. Amge? Hello, I came here because I thought I was going to be able to lie and finally drop the slavish adherence to principles of journalism. No, no, no. You misunderstand. The Taser Report was actually founded on really good journalism.

We're just very bad at it. We actually formed it because the signal got set up, I think, about six months before we started going to air. And we just thought, we've got to smash that. So you are literally our direct. It's a trap. Well, we want to join forces to destroy 7 a.m. That's our agenda.

Oh, down for that. And all the others. They've had it too good for too long. No, yeah. Well, that's why our podcast comes out at 6 a.m. Do you rate higher or lower than 7 a.m? We're lower than 7 a.m. is number one, I believe. You should know this.

I think that's right. But our whole strategy was to release at 5 a.m. So we'd be 2 hours better than 7 a.m. We're actually out at 4 a.m. Oh, no. That's what we've been doing wrong. All those people are getting on there at, you know, 4.30 are looking for us.

The 4-M crowd is where it's at. I mean, they're intense people, but they're exactly the people you want listening to your podcast. Well, thanks for coming in here at 2am before you go and record the signal at 3am because, of course, all these podcasts that drop first thing in the morning are done that morning. It's not like you'd record it the day before.

No, we've got integrity. Yeah, you do. But when you're not doing that, you're also a comedian. Yeah. So you're an excellent combination of being good at what we do, but probably also being funny than us as well. So why did we invite you on the show? I'm wondering.

I don't know. That's a question for you guys. There is that tension like you're, because not all of the news. I mean, you would probably dispute this, but not all of the, like there is a real hard line in ABC News.

They're like, well, there are only so many jokes you can make about this topic. You know, you really shouldn't kind of go there too much. So I'm constantly in a like a line by line battle to make very serious topics funnier than they are at the ABC.

and I've often lose. There have been some challenges recently. We had a bit of an internal debate about how to cover the Cleo Smith story. Which we ended up deciding to get it to. But we did put the debate about that into the podcast. I think when something goes to the line, the way to do it is to use meta-comedy.

So it's not actually comedy about the thing. It's comedy about making a joke about the thing. Yeah, and it's been four years and they still don't see it, things my way. They don't see it as a comedy, podcast they are very clear that it's a news podcast so frustrating it's really frustrating but i live in a hope so you're pushing comedy into the signal and we're trying to push facts to our podcast and i think you're doing better than we are based on the last time i listened to the signal but you're hitting the

stage this is an amazing thing live comedy is actually coming back and you're one of the first people brave enough to duck their head above the parapet i am brave and i'm fully prepared to get shot for this to overextend that metaphor yeah it's i actually did my first gig back in like eight or nine months or something last night, just like a little gig in Newtown. And it had been so long since I'd been on stage. And I was like, oh, that's right. This is my favorite thing in the whole world. And nothing else makes me as happy.

Except the podcasting. Except podcasting. Obviously, journalism, which I love with every fibre of my being. No, I do. But comedy's just, I love comedy, something, yeah, special. And I... Was the audience especially warm? because, you know, they were so warm.

They were, because they were, you know, they were from Newtown as well. So they were like, they're for support, you know, they were kind of there to feel good about themselves as well, you know. Because you know how in Melbourne, there's the Melbourne ear notoriously where audiences are just kinder to shit comedians in Melbourne than anywhere else. Which is actually terrible for the rest of us because it encourages those people to hear you. I know. Often for years.

But as long as they're well dressed, that's the caveat. They've just got to look elegant. Nice hair, yeah. My worry is that Sydney's going to post lockdown, everyone's so eager to see live comedy that we'll lower our standards and start laughing at anything. And then we'll breed a whole generation of really shit comedians like Melbourne's. No, look, I think the safeguard against that is that the Sydney scene has always been absolutely awash with hordes of desperate comics who are competing for, let it be said,

a smaller audiences' attention than in Melbourne. There is a smaller kind of regular comedy-going audience in Sydney. And so... I like to call it a more discerning audience. They are more, well, they have to be more discerning because there's like 50 hungry mouths just going like, laugh at me, I'm funny, come on, come to my show. And there's just not as many of them to go around.

So I think that's a natural safeguard against really shit comedians succeeding in Sydney. Oh, that's good. But you're mates with a lot of the great younger generation than us, like the people who are kind of in their 30s. Yeah. You're the only person I've ever seen doing improv cello, for instance, with the bear pack. Yeah, it's my angle.

It's my niche. If comedy standing, like talking to a microphone and journalism both fail, I'm thinking that improv cello. I can't believe what you'd bring in the cello? Would you call yourself the best improvised celloist in the world? I think I could honestly say that hand on heart. I can say I've never seen anyone better. Yeah.

And that's a good feeling. And I'm proud of that. So what's your new show called? My new show is called Spiders Follow Me. And you might think that, you know, you might expect that to be allegory on some level. Yeah, I saw a poster and I thought, oh, wow, it's an amazing metaphor for 2021. I feel like spiders follow me as well. And then I read the fine print down the bottom of the description, which said that

Angie May dresses as spider during this show. I've just, you know, I could have gone high, but I went low. I thought, you know, I'm going to get a little. I'm going to get a little suit made. I had arrived yesterday at the ABC, which was really thrilling, and I tried some of it on with my colleagues, and they hated it,

so I think the show is going to go well. Spiders were literally following me for a considerable portion of the pandemic. Really? Yeah, yeah. What? Yeah, I got really into looking at spider density, like how many spiders there are per square metre,

because there are some pretty interesting studies around that, because they've done all these surveys over the years, in the US, but then Australia's, you know, more spider-dense than the US. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, you sort of take an aggregate of those. And, you know, in an urban environment, in a really denuded environment, you can expect there to be three spiders within a metre of you at any time. But I think that probably, you know, we're not accounting for verticals.

So say we're in a building here that has multiple levels. So not to brag, but there might be multiple spiders over multiple levels. Maybe, I don't know. Anyway. Well, the interns leave food out in this office, so we probably have hundreds. Is spiders like human food? Oh, they probably don't. I don't know.

No, spiders like, you know, bags. Oh, they're the cockroaches. Oh, so they're here for the, yeah. They're the best thing in the world. Do you love spiders? Well, I went on a journey with this experience of being followed by spiders, where initially, because I grew up in the bush, and so you just killed spiders because killing things is out.

You killed spiders? Yeah, but why are you so shocked by this? I don't know. There's two types of people in the world, people who kill spiders, people who don't. Anyway. I would never kill a spider. It depends on the spiders. spider. I was doing Justin Hamilton's podcast at some point, and he told me after, and I told

him about the spiders and killing spiders, and he was kind of horrified, but hit it. And then as I was leaving, he was saying goodbye at the door. And he said, anyway, oh yeah, but before you go one last thing, do you know that every time you kill a spider, a part of your imagination dies? Anyway, bye! And slams the door. Oh, classic hammo. Just mic drop. Yeah. So I'm, that fucked me right up. So I'm standing in the hallway just, devastated. And not able to imagine anything because you've killed so many spiders. Right, and like flipping through the roller decks of spider corpses in my history.

And so after that, I, you know, I stopped. But then, you know, that was, that had been a natural curb on the number of spiders following me, I suppose. And so the numbers really exploded out to that point. Now they just, and they know they're safe. Yeah, exactly. They've got the memo. So I, yeah. So are you frightened of spiders?

Well, I had to come to terms with them. Like, you find them in your salad. You find them in your hair. You find them, like, in all these places. And all of a sudden, you kind of have to, you have to... I haven't had either of those experiences, but I don't have any hair. Well, no, no, it's the relatable experience of finding a spider in your salad, dog. Well, the one that happened to me was going over the harbour bridge.

Yeah. And I was moving, like, boxes or something. Back of the car was full of boxes. And I noticed a huntsman, like, on the inner pillar, like, running across my window about at three inches from my head. And I swerved And all the boxes fell over and things broke But I didn't hit anything

But I nearly hit one of the sort of staunch anything So yeah But giant huntsman next to your head That was pretty chilling But I still didn't kill it Yeah look There was one Sort of a beige coloured one

Which I'd never seen before And I'm like I might be going crazy And that crawled out While I was doing about Like 110 on the freeway Between Bathiston and Sydney That's where my folks are And that's like a moment

You really have to You fully dissociate and the second right, you like have this de-realization and you go like, all right, I'm not here, this isn't real, and you sort of have to break and pull over and just leave your body for a little bit. Short answer is, yes, I am, but you can switch it off if they're being, if they're following you enough. I mean, were spiders really following me when you look at the density? Yeah. This is the question. Or were you following them? I wasn't worried to ask because I was worried if you were okay. Okay, let's get into that. Are they actually, is it you or is it

spiders? Well, this is the goal of the show. It's an inquiry. into this question. So you were kind of right the first time in that it sort of is about like our wild capacity for magical thinking that I think has been strongly developed during the pandemic because we all spent a lot of time in our own heads and a lot of time kind of, I don't know, like conspiracy theories exploded and everyone started reading their star signs a lot more because we're looking for order in a chaotic world that, you know, we had no control over and, you know, how, I don't know, all worst finders actually following me. One hour at the factory.

Peter will resolve that for this Thursday, by the way. I was thinking, when you mentioned during the pandemic, you were looking at spider density. I was just going, of course you were, because that's what we did. I mean, during the lockdown, I'm the pandemic still going, but during lockdown, I would every night, for no reason, start to 2 a.m., even though I knew it was going to completely fuck my next day, looking at random facts, I could not stop.

And so I found out all these minor details about the British Royal family. And I've got to tell you, spider density is much more interesting than anything to do with the British Royal family. Well, that's so interesting that that's the direction you went in. I definitely went for like weird nature stuff. Like I also found out a lot about eels. Do you guys know about the eel question? No.

So no one knows how eels, we're not quite sure how eels reproduced. No one's ever seen them fuck. Ooh. In captivity, they don't reproduce. Ooh. They go on a sex strike when they're locked up. They kind of do like this Pokemon thing. Like they have like four phases.

And in their final phase, their stomach dissolves. And they can kind of walk on the land. But yeah, they find them in ponds like miles from anywhere where eels have been found in a long time. Wow. And they think that they just sort of like spray their sex cells into the air like and then they like the IVF of the animal kingdom. Like one of those vending machines at a shit pub that has a pheromone spray.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, but like actually like if it was like eel sperm and then that's how the little eel babies get made. God Charles, it was such a good decision to get a journalist on the podcast today. And so no one knows. No, it's life. It's beautiful, guys. There's your next show. Is this going to, is that in this show?

Well, look, I actually wrote a pretty extensive eel bit for the show, and then I thought it was too much. So I thought, you know what, I'll save this for the chaser. Because I'm just imagining an amazing kind of coup de the theatre, if I may, where you say, in fact, I've just released a whole bunch of eel sperm into the theatre. Are we going to see what happens? I think that would be magical. There are any lady sperm in the house?

I mean, lady eels in the house. Damn. And they just magically appear. Yeah, yeah, because it's cool as well. I also found out, oh, no, I shouldn't. Oh, but it's troubling, isn't it? People are listening to this in the morning? No, this is afternoon.

So the whole point of the afternoon edition is to have more time to go down their sorts of rabbit holes. We would have had to cut this whole thing out in the old format. Thank you. I'm so glad. I kind of feel like that was a good decision. No, but rabbit holes, because I listened to more podcasts and I realized we were the only podcast in the world that was editing everything out.

Like, most podcasts have like two minutes of preamble. There's why we better than. Is that how all the lies get in? This is a terrible miscalculation. Yes, it's terrible. No, can you tell us about rabbit holes? I just found, on the reproduction of spooky animals, I found out, because I was looking up, I'm like, how often are these spiders reproducing?

Like, are these, am I, because in Charlotte's Webb, you know, there's multiple generations of spider that follow around the same pig? And I'm like, I'm the pig. Are there how many generations of spiders? And then I found out that they reproduce, like, they can do it any time of year, and they can do it up to once a month. So, you know, it was a really big decision to stop killing them. Because I had this whole campaign with my wife and kid,

where they both were desperate for me to kill all the giant huntsmen that appeared during the recent rains. I was kind of like, no, no, they kill the cockroaches. So they had to genuinely try and figure out. I could see my three-year-old going, do I hate the cockroaches or the huntsman more? And she ended up, no, let it kill the cockroaches, let it go. And so it was all good.

And she now thinks the spiders are her friend. Because my 10-year-old's quite scared of spiders. Partly because once a spider, because I always used to just reassure him that, no, no, don't worry about spiders. And he goes, no, no, but they climb in to your room. Has he worked out that it's a lie yet that they're more afraid of you than we are of them? They're not afraid of us.

Yeah, I know. He's very cluey. Yeah. But so I left the window open one night. You know, it was quite warm. and one crawled across his face. They do do that, don't they? And now it's just a perfect, if ever he wants to just sleep in our bed,

he just goes, well, tonight, Dad, I'm a bit worried that a spider's going to scroll across my face. I love those. How guilty do you feel as a parent? No, but I just see, I think, well, I'm coming from the School of Hard Knocks. I think, you know, spider's a tank full of fight at her spiders. Yeah, exactly. You know those videos where, like, a giant parade of baby spiders comes down from the, you know, the ceiling of the room? I've always wanted about being in a room.

Because that must happen in, like, in Australian rooms. Well, that happened in our Year 5 classroom to our teacher. No way. Yeah. And her response was, it actually outshone the drama of the spiders crawling everywhere. So we were all kind of like just chill about the spiders and our teacher just had this total meltdown. It was amazing. I actually like, I have actually killed a spider.

once. But the only time I've ever done it was it was down, it was in this sort of bush shack down on the South Coast. And there was lots of sort of bugs and spiders and things like that. And it was a redback and it dropped down on the floor. And I'd said to the kids, because redbacks, you know, they can buy it. Get on the bunk beds. Get on the bunk beds now, right?

I'll deal with it, right? And so I smashed it with a shoe, like I took off my shoe, smashed it. And then it was pregnant. and literally thousands. I shit you not. Thousands of spiders, little tiny spiders. And all, like, my wife was in the shack next door. And all she could hear was,

ah, ah, spiders! And it was like Norman Gunston style, because I ended up getting out some aerogarde or, you know, mortine or whatever, and just spraying everything. This is a horror show. And do you think it was, like, God's way of saying you shouldn't have done,

on that. Yes, exactly. If I hadn't, you know, hurt the spider, then, you know, it wouldn't have, yeah, it would have just crawled across my 10-year-olds at 3 a.m. Yeah, the entire army of baby spider would have been released into your child's face as nature intended. Look, yeah, I mean, here's the thing, like drawing a line, drawing a hard line around spiders, not to kill them, what, like, where is the line for

you in terms of things that you will let yourself like mozzies? Oh, definitely kill mozzies. Cockroaches. Yeah. Why cockroaches are not spiders? But cockroaches are filthy, awful... Where are these value judgments coming from? They add no value.

Spiders are our friends because they kill everything else. It must be an evolutionary purpose for cockroaches. I spent half an hour on the weekend talking to a cockroach expert who assured me that they were part of the nature's cleaning cycle and they have a very useful function of basically getting rid of a whole lot of crap and, you know, basically, and also turning the soil over, apparently. Are we a pro-cockroach podcast? No, I reckon cockroaches are going to look after themselves.

Like, you're allowed to kill them because they're definitely going to, you know, outlast us. Uh-huh. Because they get in the house, they're fair game, I think. I think, you know, you've got to put your thumb on the measure just to help spiders along. Because I'm not sure. I think humanity's had enough pressure, like, mucking with the evolution of natural creatures. Yeah, exactly. Whereas cockroaches will look after themselves.

And also, you know, spiders. create these amazing webs and things like they're such complex creatures like i feel there's a sort of consciousness there's because they're clever yeah they're really clever you're only value the art so boring cockroaches don't do beautiful webs you you kill in the in the apartment complex that dom and i both live in uh-huh that's cute they they have um st andrew's crosses oh yeah um but in the last couple of years they haven't had them because but they were beautiful they were absolutely beautiful with the yellow stripes down the back probably since i moved in These amazing webs.

No, it's because the strata fucking committee decided a couple of years ago that they didn't like these beautiful spiders and specifically got some spray that would kill spiders. You're just going, what fuck? And it just fucks with everything. So, Charles, are you going to go and sit in Nanger's show and just be kind of like, no, spiders are our friends? How dare you?

I'm going to have a sit-in. I'm going to bring all my spider friends with me. It's potentially the show for you. It's a genuine inquiry. I go in with like a curious spirit. I'm absolutely not prejudging spiders. And as you know, I've had a real kind of come to God moment with spiders and I do let them live now and I go to great lengths to save them.

So, you know, we're a broad church. Yes. Yeah. Good. All right, Angie's show spiders follow me. It's taught the factory floor in Marrickville in Sydney, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 7pm. Details at factory theatre.com.com. If you want to go and see it, thanks, Ange.

Thanks, guys. And we'll listen to you on the signal and steal all. of the um jokes that you cut out that's what the public broadcaster's there for do you do you know you you rate higher than us though don't you oh yeah not for long we'll have another morning episode of the chaser report for you at 5 a m tomorrow two hours before 7 a m our gives from red microphones part of the a cast creator network catch you tomorrow