The Chaser Report - The APEC Stunt's 17th Anniversary | Julian Morrow

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Back when we did our WAR STORIES mini-series, Charles and Dom caught up with Julian Morrow to reflect on the infamous APEC stunt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report with Charles and Dom. My name is producer Lachlan, say hi to Nann for me. Look, Charles and Dom can't make it to the microphones today, and they apologize very sincerely. Dom is very busy as always. Dom's got a book coming out next month. This is the first time that is being announced on the podcast, but Dom's,

new book. The Dictionary of Terrible Ideas comes out in October, so look forward to that, on bookshelves. As for Charles, I asked if he could record anything today, and he said he couldn't because he was busy doing this. I'm over here stroking my dick. I got lotion on my dick right now. His words, not mine. His words not mine. I did not put words into his mouth, and I did not create an AI to make him say that. How dare you accuse me of it? If I could do that, you'd be hearing his voice right now, not mine. Now I'm here as always to transition you into a lovely replay episode and I thought we've got to go back to the War Stories Bank. War Stories is of course the summer series of episodes we recorded in 2022 where Charles and Dom caught up with all of their original

chaser friends to recount the old war on everything days and it was a lot of fun. You should definitely go back and listen to those episodes in the feed. Now when picking what episode to listen to today, I realized we've missed a very special anniversary, and that is the 17, yes, 17 year anniversary of the APEC stunt. You're listening to this podcast because you know what that stunt is, but what you might not know is what happened behind the scenes of that stunt. So, in today's episode, Charles and Dom sit down with Julian Morrow to discuss what it was like to be, well, not in the car, but running alongside the car that was holding

Chaz dressed as Osama bin Laden outside of George Bush's apartment. Okay, you can have a listen to that right after this. Yeah, so this was what, 2007, I think? Yes, that sounds right. And it was basically a curse, this whole event, because the Chases War and everything had done a year, had been going pretty well, it was starting to get quite popular,

and it was the stunts that were the thing that was, you know, people were reacting to. And then all of a sudden, A huge international conference came to our, basically, our backdoor in Sydney. And there were world leaders, the president of America, about, I forget, it was something like 20 world leaders there. And so everyone was asking, what is the chaser going to do? And essentially, our answer was nothing.

There's no way we're going to be able to do anything. And the security budget was, what, $150 million or something? Just absolutely insane. It was the biggest security operation in Australian history. There were, I think, like two and a half. metal fences put around like a around the inner city yeah and so it was what you what you would describe as not very welcoming environment to try and do silly stuns but because it was happening while we were on air we sort of felt we had to do something in the end i mean i describe it as a stunt

that went horribly right because it was sort of premised on the idea that we would fail but then we accidentally gate-crashed this international conference and made for, I think, you know, the classic 15 seconds of fame, we made the world headlines. I remember the whole weird aspect of it was that Chaz is dressed as a Sam bin Laden. So you've got your dress as a security guard. There's a motorcade going down. And I've always found it very amusing that we put Canadian flags on the motorcade. We're just trying to think of who are the most innocuous country.

Well, that's right. Well, we had to think through the possible countries. And so because, you know, we all looked, well, we wouldn't have been convincing if we suggested we were from Indonesia or something. So that narrowed down the countries. The idea that there was a motorcade, we thought about New Zealand,

but we didn't think that anyone would believe that New Zealand actually had a motorcade. Prime Minister would probably turn up in a bike or something. And so that basically led us to Canada, which turned out to be the right country to go for, because it just had the right veneer of, feeling like it was a big enough country, but no one really knowing who the Prime Minister was.

Yeah, and it's kind of innocuous. Oh, Canada, yeah. Exactly. And the whole stunt came about because I was hauled into a security meeting before APEC with one of the ABC's security advisors. And I just assumed that this was, basically, we were going to be read the right act

and told what we couldn't do. But Tony, he was the security advisor and was an ex-SAS soldier who loved this stuff, was laying down the law saying what you can't do. And towards the end of the meeting, He said, there's absolutely no way you'll be able to get in. The only way you'll be able to get into that event is with a motorcade. And I was like, that's quite an interesting idea.

And then he was into it. And he gave us all the suggestions for how to get a motorcade in. And then, you know, obviously ABC Legal just went, yeah, that sounds great, do it. Fantastic. And we left that day. No, it took a long time. It took a long time to get them over the line.

Well, we discussed before that Chase has done to follow the format. where can you take a motorcade. I mean, in the history of that's an even bigger prop than a Trojan horse. Yes, and the moment that I actually first thought that we might get away with it was when I actually saw the motorcade because it felt like it was just a silly idea that wasn't going to succeed. And in fact, the whole point of the stunt was that the motorcade wouldn't get in and then we would try increasingly silly ways of getting in.

And that was where we were going to get the comedy. So I think we had some people who were going to try and get on on those big sort of... There were subsequent plans, right? Yeah, we were going to try and get there by sea. I don't think we could manage getting there by air because we did think that that would sort of get shut down. Yeah, but we did do by road, and it all just worked.

But why didn't they tap you, tap your phones and tap your internet accounts and know that that's what you were going to do? Like, if it spent $150 million, surely just pay a hacker at 25 bucks and... I just assumed that that would have happened. And I kind of thought on the day that when the motorcade drove out of ABC, that we would just get police had turned up and, you know, it'd be off. And it wasn't like we'd made any secret of it because I remember being asked in radio interviews, what are you going to do for APEC?

We've got asked it all the time. And in, you know, our typically responsible way, because I thought we weren't going to do anything, I would say things like, look I can't really tell you but it's going to be big just to manage expectations right so did the motorcade leave from Ultima came out the back of ABC Ultima and we had two motorbikes at the beginning

that weren't police but were just guys on bikes who looked a little bit like it and then of course the other thing was that we had four people running beside the motorcade which hasn't happened since JFK. No one does that, but we needed to have camera people there. Yeah, so there's a camera crew, but also people walking outside. Like you were on foot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because we stopped the motorcade outside New South Wales Parliament, got out and then started running down the street. And it turned out that what had happened was, because there were so many motorcades going around Sydney that day, there'd been a general order issued that no motorcades would have be stopped. So we just started going down the street and cops started waving us through. I remember one guy saying the road is yours.

And that was when we started to realize that the whole idea that this stunt would end when we got stopped by the police had a fatal flaw in it. So the whole $150 million security operation to protect Sydney from terrorists. This is during the war on terror. Al-Qaeda could easily have been trying to penetrate it at the same time. If they'd thought of having a motorcade, they would have gone all the way through to the Opera House. Yep, yep. They'd put a ring of steel around the city and then left the front door open. and in fact the Daily Telegraph the next day

had like an ad for the addition of the Daily Telegraph and I think it said something like thank God it was them which I think is the only time the Daily Telegraph said anything positive about The Chaser Now there are lots of things that I've half remember from this period because obviously we talked about it a lot but there was a point subsequently where we got the police evidence brief which they'd been planning to use to charge us correct me if I'm wrong Jules because I know you know this better than I do

was it not true that the day before something like that John Howard had been held up out the front of the opera house because the federal police or whoever it was had lost the key to the padlock and that was why the order had gone through that all motorcades had to be waved through I hope that's true I've been saying it for years I hope it's true

I'm sure that it's true without actually knowing I have no memory of that whatsoever to be honest it must be true it must be true but there were so many things about that that day that were funny. The thing I remember from the police tapes was that a lot of the people who were arrested, because I think 11 people were arrested or something.

Yeah, yeah. And me and Chaz were obviously in one category, and then the rest of the guys were crew. And they were going to run a defence that basically the other people were just sort of doing their job, so they shouldn't be convicted of a criminal offence. The only problem was that one of the employees, it was actually a cousin, second cousin of mine,

had the camera on his lap in the motorcade that was picking up the audio from the microphone that was in my tie. It was also picking up what was being said by him in the motorcade. So they were going to run a legal defence saying he was just following orders. He is mortified that this has happened. He didn't want it to happen.

But we did then also have a recording of him going, oh my God, this is brilliant. This is awesome. They're letting us write through. These idiots! Oh, I love it. this, which somewhat compromised the defence.

The Chaser report, news a few days after it happens. The other juicy detail that I remember, and again, I can't absolutely swear that this is true. But somewhere in my mail, I've got all this information, is that there's a legendary federal police police officer called Skull or something

who was a bald-headed, and we saw him all the time, he was really authoritative and really a legend. And it may not have been him, but someone in the federal police, who waved through the Chaser Motorcade had earlier that day convened a seminar on how to recognise the chaser

is that true? I'm sure it's true. It must be true, yeah. I mean, they certainly all knew that we were coming. And you could see it from the guy when I walk up to him because basically when we got in,

I had to have a word to Chaz about how to stop the stunt and the idea was that if Chas got out and Osama bin Laden got out that would probably end things and the first thing the guy said was, oh, chaser. But yeah, the police were waiting for us

and then they ushered us in. There was one police officer who gave evidence that he recognised that it was the chaser, but the motorcade was going very fast, and it would have been a breach of occupational health and safety for him to stop the motorcade. He was fearful for his personal safety. Policemen are not allowed to stop fast cars.

Which I'm not sure was, yeah, it was the best thing to do. But yeah, there were a lot of fun things about that day. We ended up being up in a lockup for about, I think, 12 or 14 hours. and Nathan, one of the main producers of that stunt, Nathan Earle, managed to get the tape out of the camera and he hit it in a place that, I think I've never done this, but I'm pretty sure it would be uncomfortable.

I believe that this mini DV tape, which is probably what about six, seven centimetres long. It's pretty substantially large, yeah. It was secreted somewhere under his scrotum for about 12 hours. And I remember looking at him in the day, saying, oh, it's such a shame that the police took all our tapes, and he looked at me and just sort of conveyed without saying anything that, no, no, he had, and he looked

down, that he had a tape. And you were assuming it was somewhere else. Yes, so full credit to him, when we got back to the office, there was a sort of ceremonial revealing, he put his hand down his pants and produced this tape, threw it up in the air, and one of our mates James Edwards, who was the editor, had to make a critical decision, and he closed his eyes and put his hands out and grabbed the tape and digitised it. So we were all very proud of Nathan for managing to smuggle that tape out. And we were even happier the next day when the police gave us all our tapes back.

And it turned out he didn't need to do that at all. And then I had the fun of doing the safe follow-up with, I think it was Craig and Chris, going in the cardboard motorcade. Because the thought was, well, if they didn't recognize that motorcade with the chaser, how pissy a motorcade will they actually stop? And to their credit. They eventually got it. We strapped cardboard cars to ourselves and went back down there

because you guys weren't allowed to. That was why it was so much fun, because you'd all been told formally that you had sort of exclusion orders. But we weren't under them. So we could just turn up the next day and rub their faces in it all over again. But I think it's fair to say that during that day, I don't know what you guys were doing outside,

but I think we all sort of knew that in terms of the chase of doing stunts, it was never going to get better than that. that. And in a way, that was sort of the beginning of the end of our ability to do a certain type of stunt because it just got, which became so well-known. And yeah, I mean, look, the ratings were crazy for the ABC.

I think it's the biggest comedy ratings I've ever had. They went around the world. I mean, we've got a collection of the newspaper headlines. Because the world's press was there and nothing else happened. It went around the world. I was in North Korea the following week. It was honestly true. And I was sitting in a hotel bar

and there was a guy from the foreign affairs department in North Korea and he, and I said, I'm from a comedy group called The Chaser. And he went, The Chesa, and he knew about the Apexton. Oh, yes, we're big in Pyeong. And it's like, oh, no one is allowed to listen to foreign radio here, but because I'm in the secret, like the foreign service, I'm allowed to listen to it. And even he knew about it.

Absolutely. And there were other international sort of events that were held while we were making the Chases War and everything. Of course, everyone said, what are you going to do for that? And we never tried again because we sort of knew we wouldn't. But I did see some years later that there are now special laws that relate to what you can or can't do with a motorcade. Really?

Which I like to think are our little laws. I didn't know that. Well, at least we achieved something. Yeah, yeah. But also, wasn't there some big jamboree or something, some girls' scouts? I wanted to get over this world. World Youth Day, the Pope came to Australia. And there was that weird thing with the stations on the cross,

and it was a completely bizarre idea. And everyone was convinced that the chaser was going to do something. And they didn't even have a TV. Some people would helpfully give us the advice. So you guys should do another APEC. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, yeah. No, like, we'll just have another crack at that one in a million chance,

see if it could work. But, yeah, I mean, look, it was never going to do as well as that day. Although the fact that we got away with it actually became a bit of a production problem because, firstly, everyone knew what had happened. There was no hiding the event. And it wasn't actually that funny when it happened. It was a better story than it was a piece of television.

Well, that was the genius of how it was actually produced because I remember a lot of meetings about how to do it, but the fact that it was narrated, which we never did at any other time. The stunts were never narrated or rarely narrated. But the way the story was told to make the stakes so high and I guess everyone was just waiting for it too because they knew that we'd done it. And then there was that weird thing where we didn't know what the outline was going to be and we had been watching this footage for a couple of days and it was only like two days in

that somebody noticed that all the police swarmed around me and that Osama bin Laden literally the most wanted man in the world was walking next to us with no cops around him and that became the punchline completely unplanned. And years later we found that we had no idea that George Bush was asleep in the hotel right there, as we said with Chaz in this segment. And that there were sharpshooters on the roof. I mean, we wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near there. Yeah, I did run into a guy at a pub once who said to me, oh, I know you.

I've had you in my crosshairs. And I was like, yeah, yeah. And he's like, no, no, I had you in my crosshairs on that APEC day. Now, you know, the good thing about crosshairs is that you can't feel them when you're a few hundred metres away. but we were definitely in the line of fire that day. And you just couldn't do something like that these days. There was a funny little coda to the event, though,

because when we were finally let go at the end of the day, the police had been pretty nice to us. And they let all the other people out. But at the end of the day, they said to me and Chazard, like the others can go, you guys come here. And they took us, like, deeper and deeper into the building with these two big, burly guys. And we started getting a little worried.

They took us into this private room. They closed the doors. There were no cameras. And we thought, oh, shit, we might cop a bit of stuff. This is where the phone books come out. Well, yeah, exactly. The New South Wales police had a bit of reputation then. So they took us into this room.

And we were like, what are they going to do? And these two guys said, look, just before we go, can we get a photo? And so I've never seen the photo. But somewhere, there is a photo of me and Chaz as a summer. bin Laden. Is he still a Samo? Yeah, we still dressed as Osam bin Laden with the two guys who arrested us all holding up our APEC passes, two real ones and two fake ones. Oh, wow.

If there's anyone out there who can source that photo, I would love to see it. But yeah, the cops actually dropped us home at the end of the day. It was a very good service. I can highly recommend the New South Wales Police. $450 million you'd expect. Yeah, that's right. I still can't believe that it worked. Like the amount of money and effort. And we somehow managed to just get in any way. It was the stunt that went horribly right.

But, you know, what I like about it is that it did actually make a decent point that there was a huge amount of money spent on security. And then it's always human error. That is the thing that, you know, foils these, or that causes security flaws. And there was a fairly big one at that day. Well, the Brisbane Olympics is coming up. What are we going to do? We should do a motorcade.

Thanks, Chil. Thanks, kids from both microphones. We're part of the ACUSCRETA Network, and we'll catch you on Monday with a regular edition. Charles, are we really going to get back into doing them daily? Nah, I reckon we shouldn't. Let's just give up. Let's have the whole podcast yet.

All right, done.