The Chaser Report - The War On 20 Year Anniversaries

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Twenty years and a couple days ago, the world changed forever when the ABC aired the first episode of The Chaser's War on Everything. Charles and Dom bring you behind the scenes of how they pitched The War, and also a few other ideas that thankfully never saw the light of day.---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] 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 Dom and Charles. And hasn't it been surprising to discover that anybody cares about the fact that this week on Tuesday, it was 20 years since the beginning of the Chasers War on Everything. The program which may not have changed comedy, but certainly changed our employment prospects, for a bit before they returned to where they were. Yes.

It was fantastic. I mean, it was, because remember the first season was on Friday nights, wasn't it? Yeah. And there were something like 26 or 27 weeks of it. It was absolutely extraordinary. It was in the spot where the fat had run and they wanted to squeeze something in there. And of course, we being us, we didn't just want to do a panel chat show about the news, which is probably kind of what they wanted us to do.

We did this whole extravaganza of sketches and ridiculous. and whatever. Yeah, I can't believe. He basically said, if you want to do a show, this is the only show you can do is this massive beast of a thing on quite a tight budget. And so we kind of had to say, yes, of course we did. It's great. So I actually, I've just realized I've got the pitch document that we wrote not for the ABC,

but for, I think it was originally for SBS that we wrote it. I remember I was in America. And we were in America. And we were putting together. And we were insisting. that it should be called, hey, hey, it's the Chaser. Remember that it was for a long time? It was going to be called, hey, hey, it's the Chaser.

That's right. No, because actually, no, I'm actually, I'm a little bit wrong there. Because actually what happened was we pitched another show. It was called something like The Chaser's World Report or something to SBS. Remember that? I don't remember at all pitching to SBS. I think I would have been too ashamed. Right.

And then we sort of reworked that idea, taking out all the world part, because, you know, ABSC didn't really care about the world. They just wanted, I don't know, comedy. Ozzy satire. And it was called, hey, hey, it's the chaser. Now, see, what you were... Certainly the idea of it being a variety show was there from the off, right? Like, we wanted to...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We didn't want an election desk. We just wanted it to be kind of whatever we could think of. Add in forces? These are just some segment ideas. I've just got literally a draft doc of notes for... Let's just play some heads. This is great.

I haven't seen this. So this is what, 22, 23 years ago? Yeah, this is 2006. Right, here we go. No, 2005, it must be, I think. Let's have a look. If not earlier, yeah. Yeah, July 2005.

So we had Hay Haye as our kind of Google Group name for scripts for a very long time. That's right. Now, we should probably just update younger listeners on a few things. First of all, the Chases War on Everything was a TV show that broadcast on broadcast television. So literally, it wasn't. It wasn't like a streaming service where you could just choose to watch it whenever you wanted. That's right. You needed to turn up at whenever it was 9pm on Wednesday nights and eventually.

Yeah. At first it was Friday night, 7 o'clock or something? No, no, no, no. It was later than that. It was 8 or 8.30 on Fridays. In fact, I think that they initially said that we could have the 10 or 10.30 p.m. slot because that's where blah, blah, blah, which was Andrew Denson's first TV show, premiered. And then I think you're right.

I think it ended up being at like 8 p.m or 8.30 p.m. on a Friday night. I think it was 8 p.m. And then, but the funny thing is that, so just to put a little bit more context. So this, so that's why we say, oh, it was on a Friday night. That's the only time you could watch it. If you didn't watch it then, it was just gone, right? And eventually there were DVDs, but not for a very long time. And then the other concept that we should just talk about is this thing called, hey, hey, Saturday, which was, what would you describe Hayahette Saturday as? It was sort of like, well, you know, the Ebola virus, how, you know, like, it sort of,

or COVID. Yeah, there's a sort of outbreak. Started from, I don't know, a bat bit of pangolin. I think there were several pangolin on that show. I think the thing about Hay, hey, hey at Saturday is there's an outbreak of hey, hey, every sort of, like, it had a long, sort of first infection. But then every few years in Australia, for many years, there was an outbreak. Remember, they always tried to bring Hay Hats Saturday back?

Yes, they did. You know what it's like, Charles? It's like bird flu. And there is a bird in Aussie ostrich involved, a very strange time. He was by far the best thing on it, wasn't he? Him and Dicky Neer. Yeah, that's true. I mean, but that's only by comparison with Darrell Summers.

No, I'm under the age of... It was a variety show. I'm under the age as at 45 is going to understand any of these references, Don. Literally. He was from Dancing with the Stars. Anyway, it was a variety show, which means a show, it's kind of like the experience of watching a whole bunch of different YouTube videos, except they're all the same people. Yes.

And they're exactly the same every week. And they include lots of blackface. Yes, that was a signature element in their formula. So, yeah, it was. It was a variety show. We wanted to do a little bit of everything. And the Chastas War and Everything was a very good name. I must say, I don't love all of our names, but that was a sort of an attitude of

creating havoc in a non-specific direction. Yes, and it was kept the essence of the time as well, wasn't it? It was the war on terror was George Bush's thing. And so, you know, we expanded it. And look, I'll just give you a rundown of the list that I've got just in my drop box from, you know, a year before it went to air. I can't believe that. So ad enforcers, Ad Avengers.

I think that we actually did end up doing something like this. Test the promises made by air. That was called... The ad road test. The ad road test was exactly that. Go to companies and contest their claims, i.e. 20% more hair bounce. Get KFC to twist things your way, making unreasonable demands. Go to the government and show how speed isn't actually made in a big car wheel using black paste.

But in test tubes, what's that? That must be... We refine some of the ideas in the writers. The anti-drugs. That was an anti-drugs ad at the time where they went, your kit could be on drugs. And then they showed it being made using black paste. But apparently it was generally that we went into McDonald's.

We got into trouble for going into McDonald's too often and testing the premises of it. It was like product placement. Yeah, that's right. Oh, this is a sad idea. I don't know whether we ever did this one. Reality TV Career Watch. Each week we report on how the career of a reality TV contestant from four years ago is going.

That's a very cruel idea. A little bit. But that would work today, wouldn't it? Well, I mean, it's a sort of idea that you have when you don't really have an idea. But no, look, there were lots of great things in the series. What have we learned from Current Affairs this week was reliably great. So this is in this document. What we learned from Current Affairs shows.

There's literally, but the name of the title didn't even change. We never come up with a good title for it other than just literally what the segment was. But the examples are we learned that the mayor of Toowoomba is evil because they've got this camera angle. We learned that Naomi Robson doesn't keep many secrets, montage of every time Naomi Robson says, well, it's no secret. That's quite funny. Oh, wow. These problems become really bad.

How bad? Outrage. The Chaser Report. Use a few days after it happens. Well, it says mostly a criticism of the show's methods rather than content. This is quite a good sort of, talking about. That's classified? Oh, yeah.

We create our own bizarre and or unattractive sounding classified. ads and record people's responses on voicemail. Is it that? That's not a bad idea. A recorded greeting will have to solicit the call to explain why they're interested in the ad. Volunteers wandered for exciting medical research. Well paid, slight chance of amputation. That's quite funny.

Oh, wow. Flatmate Wondered must be prepared to share with domesticated tiger. That's a good idea. I don't think we ever did that. Hello? No, I don't think so. I don't think classified ads. No, that was definitely.

I remember the idea bouncing around that. Self-published book of the week. We review a self-published book. I feel like some of these are just mean. That is just calling things that everyone knows a shit, shit. That's a bit lazy. I mean, the show, it was really the stunts that made the show. Yeah.

As much as some people in the team love to think that the sketches are the thing that stood the test of time. It was the attitude of going into a thing. And so it's things like testing out a Trojan horse by making a wooden Trojan horse, driving into the entrances of various public buildings, seeing if we'd learned from history. I mean, that to me, that is an enduringly funny idea, I have to say. It wasn't my idea.

But that, and there were so many places where they just waved it through. Oh, my God. And I think, I think the problem was if Craig was inside it, so you didn't want to wait, you definitely didn't want it. I've just found Chaser Televersity pitch documents. Oh, that was, that was, we kept trying to make that series. Was there before or after, it was such a good idea. It was after.

I think it was after. No, no, I think there was. wasn't it? Because let's see the date of the document. I remember interminable meetings about that idea. We got money to make it. Oh, I know it was. August 2004.

It was when Kristen Craig were off doing Triple J and the rest of us were trying to prove we could do a show without them. We couldn't. They may have been involved with it on some level, but we definitely, we had all these meetings trying to get it up. So the concept for that was, it was again, it was not a bad idea that it was a television university. And so you'd get degrees by watching incredibly short summaries of whatever the thing was,

history, chemistry, whatever. I still like that idea. You could do a TikTok university now. Well, we actually, I mean, Wankanomics did that idea. Our first Wankanomics show, we handed out MBAs to everyone who watched the full 60 minutes of

Wankanomics. Oh, there you go. Yeah, so, and then, oh yeah, and remember, we didn't call them stunts. We called them street stories. I'm just trying to find the... Was that a Denson thing? Yeah, no, it was a lawyer thing.

I feel like that was... It was, it was, so the ABC I see lawyers got really worried that half our documents were stunts, right, because under their liability insurance, doing a stunt made it incredibly risky and dangerous and would put up the premiums. But if we called them street stories, you know, and especially if they, you know, if we did something terrible and somebody got injured and it went to court saying, well, you were just doing a stunt, made it.

Why did you expect what happened with a stunt? Yeah, far more risky. Whereas Chaz dressing up and going to sell knives, fake knives at a Bulldogs game at a time when the team was associated with quite a lot of violence, that wasn't a stunt, that was an investigative journalism. And look, I've just found the Chaser Decides pitch document from 2004. Oh, yes. Oh, my goodness.

So Chaser Decides was going to have a mockumentary look and feel according to the original pitch document. Was it? Yes. Actually, no, I've got the timing wrong, you know. Kristen Craig went off and did Triple J before that. They must have been back involved in the television. Yeah, I have a feeling everyone worked on...

Chase the Sites is when we all came back together. Yeah, everyone worked on Chase the Televersity. It was our attempt to get into sort of more scripted comedy. But the thing is, and this problem continues to haunt me to this day, right, which is if you script an entire comedy show and you go to say Screen Australia or any Screen funding body or Screen New South Wales, they'll say, well, that's not scripted. That's funny, right?

And there's a distinction between narrative comedy, which is considered scripted, and funny comedy, which is sort of still scripted, but isn't considered scripted because it's considered entertainment, right? So even if you... This is very strange. Yeah, even if you work really, really hard. And you're not... Like, if you have an entertainment show that's highly... But doesn't follow a standard sort of narrative drama structure, then... You don't get any, you know, production offsets, which is like 30% of your budget.

The screen bodies are just not interested in you at all. Don't get bitter about the present. No, I'm just saying. I'm just saying it's the most bizarre thing. And it's like I thought, oh, well, they'll solve that eventually. And then 20 years later, it's like, and that's why I think Australian comedy is so bad compared to the rest of the world in that there's just no money in writing down jokes. Like in Britain, they don't seem to have this problem. And apparently... But it's always been the

case. There's always been much better comedy over there. Yeah, because apparently, like, even a panel show in the UK gets five times the budget for the same length of show as you do in Australia. It's just, anyway, yeah. Well, the thing about the war was that it tended to be, this isn't universally true, but it tended to be that the more effort was put into a script and the more budget, the less likely it was to work. Oh, definitely. I'm reminded of this segment called Starship Proposterous, which was like a Star Trek parody. And we thought, well, if we're going to commit to the set for that, we're going to have

to do like four or five of them to make it worthwhile. And it just wasn't funny. I can't remember why it didn't work. But as of the very first, whatever it was, I think it's a DVD extra. I don't think we have read a single one of them, but it just didn't work. Whereas the dress up in a stupid costume and go and annoy someone, that almost always work. You almost always got something interesting out of it. Even the sort of things you'd never do nowadays, like getting Julian to dress up as the Dalai Lama,

which I think was just a bald joke on Julian really. But there were some very interesting reactions to that. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Yeah, look, and that is absolutely true. Like literally every time you had a really big prop, it would just, the whole scene would fail. That was true even, like, from the first. Oh, here we are, Chaser World. This is what it was.

The SBS version of this was called Chaser World. The Chaser takes on the world in 10 episodes and wins is the pitch document. Commercial Inconvidence, whatever that means. It's a variety show with a Chaser Twist. It's Dateline meets Hey Hey at Saturday. Everything had to have a Chaser Twist back then. My God, this is terrible. Your archive of pictures that didn't get up is so...

We must do more of them in the podcast. I had to upgrade my Dropbox subscription the other day, and that's just from the pitch documents folder. It's a terrible. Failed pitch documents folder. That's the main. Oh, look. Yeah, I mean, this should be a weekly series, really.

Oh, my God. This is not a good show. I don't, like. No, it sounds like, I mean, the best shows tended to come from the actual content. The high concept stuff often didn't really. I've got to tell you, this is the worst thing I've ever read. I don't want to make any, I don't want to cast aspersions on series that may or may not have had an incredibly large election desk, a central comic idea.

But sometimes those things are a bit hard to sustain. Yeah. Well, to be honest, I think the problem with that show wasn't the size of the desk. It was the failure to reinforce that premise every five seconds. Like, I think whenever we had a high, like, you've got to spend half the time. reinforcing the premise. Yeah, yeah. And instead, it became this one joke at the beginning of the episode.

And then it sort of became inconvenient. So rather than leaning into that joke, it sort of just became an interstitial. I think it was just that there was actually not enough time spent on that gag. But that's my technical. But rambling reminiscence is about the wild. But let me just read you the worst thing that the James is ever written, right? To Chase's World. I don't even remember this.

I might not have been involved in it. So there's a part in the Chaser World pitch 2005. No, you definitely would have been. Well, your name's in it. Okay. Which is, so section 10, you know, right up the top, section 10. It's actually the final point in the format. And of course, since SBS is a publicly funded institution with serious obligations, dot, dot, dot, dot, 10, SPS charter time.

This is our way of addressing the fact that the, We're all white men, right? This is great. A regular interruption. This is the last episode of the podcast. You're getting us cancelled. We're about to be cancelled. A regular interruption in the show,

signalled by a loud siren where the audience has to participate in a different activity each week to meet the multicultural requirements of the SBS Charter. So we're not even meeting. We're getting the audience members to meet the requirements of the SPFS Charter. Can an ordinary audience member explain to the nation the implications of global warming using only schoolyard French. Yes, because French is so multicultural. That was our take of what the diversity of SPS was, French.

Can anyone guess the population of the least populous capital city in China? Is it true? There's only one capital city in China. I think provincial capital, each province has its own capital. Sure, that's true. And apparently, according to this document, it's 30 million, is the least populous capital city in China.

I think that's right, Chongqing. Oh, that wouldn't have been the slightest bit funny. Is it true that the white men in our audience can't jump? I don't know how that's multicultural. Let's focus on the white people. Gosh, I wonder why SPS rejected this terrible idea that I don't even remember? Oh, wow. I could go on.

Okay. Well, there's other as much as. So when we look back on the war and everything, if there's ever a degree of cringe, there obviously is about everyone being a white male. That's why I wasn't part of the series. I just thought, you know. Yes. That's it.

Part of this erasure. Yes. No, but in all sincerity, part of the issue with mine, not only was me not being as good at performing, but the show in no way needed a sixth white man. Oh my God. There was absolute, well, you were the sixth, and then you stepped away,

and I would have been the seventh. Yeah, so you were actually being woke. And is that why you went broke? No, there was just no, there was no case where I would have been needed to do anything. Like, there was nothing that I could do. Where you needed a seventh cast mate. Like, he just didn't make any sense.

Well, no, that's not true. I remember in the early days, Don, you had some great, weren't you the weather man or something? Like in, in... Yeah, see in and in. Yeah, see in and in. That was great. See in and in and then. That was a highlight.

That was worked better. Highlight of each week was done dying. My cousin thought that was real, you know. What? I died multiple times in one episode. That's right. Okay, do you think there's been enough self-indoligent this episode or? I was actually reluctant to even do.

this episode, Dom. I know, I know. But I do think, to be fair to us, I think we in no way have captured what was good about the war. And we barely mentioned it. We spent most of the episode talking about terrible ideas that never happened. So I think it's been a very us tribute to the biggest TV series that certainly I'll have been involved. Yes, yes. Look, there's even a later TV show. I'd never even remember this, the Chaser Guide to the GFC. Oh, really? Gosh, we were really desperate to get a show. And then the Chaser Guide to Having a Baby, I think that was actually Andrew Hanson from memory,

and I worked on that. Yeah. Gosh, it's a huge pitch document. I don't even remember it. People sometimes ask why there haven't been any more Chaser shows. I think we're answering the question. Extraordinary. Okay, well, yeah, we're too busy writing pitch documents.

We don't have time to make a TV show. There were some good ideas in recent years. Maybe we'll put one together one of these days before we all die. Yeah, yeah, before we die. Okay, that's a good, yeah, okay, before we die, we'll do it. Dom, I've got to go. I've got another pitch document to write. You got a pitch?

Yeah. See if you can get something up at SPS. I'm sure they're desperate to hear from you. And we were thinking for Monday's Epe, what we're going to do. We recorded a couple of years ago interviews with all the Chaser people about, you know, actual sort of stunts and, you know, the recollections of the war for this podcast. They were called war stories. And we thought we might run an episode on Monday. And maybe...

Yeah, they're all in the feed if you want to go back and find it. They're really good. We sat down with all the five stars and they shared their stories, the best moments. Yeah, and we'll highlight one on Monday and point you in the right direction. Anything else? I wanted to talk about AI taking over the world, but let's just... I mean, that's perennial. Yeah, we'll do that next week.

If AI lets us. And we've got an update on. the very fast train as well. But we'll leave that all. Oh, that's very exciting. Very exciting. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Catch you then next week. We're from the O'Connor Class Network. See ya.