The Chaser Report - WAR STORIES: Chas's Most Painful Pranks

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

This Summer The Chaser Report presents... WAR STORIES! Chas is back and his body is on the line! Chas shares his Top 5 most painful moments in his career caused by doing stunts, including ones that were so dangerous they never made it to air, and a stunt that has left him with physical damage to this day. 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 another summer series podcast with the wonderful Chas Lichiello, Charles Firth and me Dom Knight. And last time, if you haven't heard that, it was brushes with the law. Chaz, this time you're taking it a step further. I am. I am. I'm talking at times when I wish I had brushes with the law instead.

Because with the chaser, there was basically one of two things that was, well, there was one of three things that were going to happen on any particular stunt, especially that I did, because I wasn't the one who had the silver tongue. So there were three kinds of stunts. I was either going to risk getting arrested. I was going to risk humiliating myself in a horrible way that would make my parents disown me, or I was going to get hurt. And today, we're going to focus on the getting hurt.

That's in the moment. The Chaser Report, less news, more often. Right, so Chazza, I hadn't quite understood the context that your stunts were the ones Craig and Jules rejected. Essentially, yes, yes. They got the first pick, and then Andrew got a pick, and then Chris got a pick, and then I got the rest. But that was true right from the word go. I remember Andrew Denton saying, now, I really think, you know,

Chairs should just do really physical comedy stuff that involves him being hurt. Yes, that's pretty much it. That's pretty much the direction from Go. It was a niche. Yeah, it was a niche. Yockey part it well. Like, it's better than wearing a tie to work. That's all I can say, well, it's not, but let's talk about it.

You have to wear a tie-in-court. That is true, that's true. Look, right off the bat, I just want to just explain to the listeners something which we all know, may even have made TV, but you might not know, which is as a general of thumb, when something looks dangerous on TV, probably not. When something looks, the really dangerous stuff, either looks innocuous because you didn't get your cameras in the right position because it was dangerous, or it never got to air because it was dangerous.

That's usually the case. And I'm going to go through my top five moments when I felt physical pain on the chaser. And four of them, you probably don't know. One of them you may well know, but the other four are going to surprise you because, like I say, it's the ones you don't know about that really hurt. So let's, should we kick off with the one that everyone knows? Well, not everyone. Fans.

People who don't watch the chaser would know it. But people who watch the chaser would know the Botox. which yeah now that one hurt so yeah essentially this stunt was this was right the end of the chaser and i was just like we knew the chase was wrapping up media circus end of oh it was i'm sorry hamster wheel ended this yeah yeah this is the war this is the war on everything right right the end of the war and everything i'm talking about when we knew that it was after make a wish we knew we went coming back and so yeah and we just thought yeah we've got three weeks four weeks left let's just leave nothing nothing in reserve let's just do everything and and i try to

whole bunch of stuff, most of which went nowhere because it was really dangerous. This one, it got somewhere. And the idea was for me to try to divide my body in half. Half of me was just going to remain the same. The other half was going to try and replicate Daniel Craig and see which half of me got a higher score on hot or not. So on the Daniel Craig side, I dyed my hair blonde, I got blue contact lens, I spray tanned, I waxed the whole half of my body. I did all kinds of stupid things. I did lots of one-sided workouts, etc. My wife didn't let me get a pecking implant. I wanted to get one peck implant. My wife said, no, we're drawing the line to surgery. But anyway, but yeah, but the last remaining element was to fill my lip with

restolin and fill my face with Botox. Now, I would we should just, just remind you what that sounded like? Oh. So Botox doesn't work on palms. But what about faces. Lovely. And those 34 injections were so fun, I had my lips enhanced as well. So what was the punch up? Biltox, take two to get maximum strength. Okay, and the lips?

Lips, you see that immediately. I'm getting the impression that the lips work pretty quick. Okay, so that was, yeah, that's just, I mean, it's very hard to do all. audio from a visual sketch like that. But yeah, that was, that had the essential information. 34 Botox shots. And like he said, it takes two weeks. That was the reason I had 34 Botox shots because we had to film that in the week

of the final show because I was going to have Botox in half my face after that. So I couldn't do anything else, right? Yeah. So we had to try and, try and inject enough Botox into my face. They would take effect in one week, visible effect, in one. one week when it takes two weeks for Botox to take full effect. So what that means was, I had to ask this guy, what is the maximum amount of Botox you can pump into your face

without doing serious damage, permanent damage to your face, that I can see the results in one week. And he said it's about 35 shots. He said, normally you get two or three. And so I got about 12 times the recommended dose of Botox. It's a half my face. So that after one week, It would look great on TV.

So you have a huge result after a week, and yet that was only not even probably 50% of the full impact. Exactly. And so it looked great on TV. It was wonderful. If you look at the photos, if you look online in the photos, they'd look wonderful, that half my face. But you need to realize it went way, way further. And by the time the second week had come around, I could barely talk. Like I was full on, I was going for an Oscar, like a Daniel Day Lewis-style Oscar,

acting like I had some palsy or something. Like, it was just, it was way, way. And you know how long it lasts? It lasts six months. So now it fades gradually as time goes on. But for a month, I was in such pain in my face. Pain. Yeah, it was really, really, really bad.

Why is it painful? Well, because, like, it does numb you, but the line between the part of you that's Botox and the part that isn't. Oh, yeah. And it goes a lot of the pressure. Yeah, because I imagine, like, imagine a freezing half of your face. Yeah, because it's not meant to work like that. You're not meant to have half your face.

Why didn't you just ask them to put? 34 jebbs in the other side of your face. I think even at up. They suggested that. They actually, that's what the first exertion said. The upsell. I'm back a week later. That wasn't Dr. Daniel Lanzer, was it?

No, it wasn't. But yeah, they did suggest that. And in hindsight, maybe that would be a good idea. But anyway, I didn't. So I slept for most of that month anyway, because I look like a freak anyway, even without the Botox. You were a real mess. I really was.

I really was. But anyway, so that was. so that was the one that people know that that hurt a little bit but that wasn't that's that's that's the fifth most hurt oh okay it gets way worse than that okay so let's go into the next one sometimes the harm is accidental normally like you're you're trying to take precautions as much as possible obviously you're not going out of your way to hurt yourself but sometimes you're an idiot and you do something that's meant to protect you but the actual act of protection really hurts and this is the example i'm going to tell you i'm going to tell you stunt very briefly you won't

remember this. It's been lost to the annals of time. It was an ad road test about something called lock tight glue. And in the ad, these people stand on the roof with glue on the so they stand upside down. That's the idea, right? And so we're testing that as we do with the ad road test and we put the lock tight glue on my, on the soles of my shoes, hung me upside down and then I fell, it didn't work. Now, obviously that was, I didn't fall from the ceiling. That That was a trick shot. I fell from about a metre and a half onto a mat. But still hurts, by the way.

They don't tell you that. Falling a metre and a half onto a mat still hurts. Yes. But why didn't you just put the camera frame the camera so that you're only falling six inches? It's the thing. You need to have the camera on the ground looking up to try and get the angle of falling. But you need to have enough headroom for you to fall. So registers that you're falling.

So then you can, and then you can, you can graphic it up to look like it's from the roof, right? And this was in the days before CGI. It's barely in the days of, the days when film was around. Also, Chaz was much cheaper than CGI.

Yeah, yes. Anyway, so you, you, basically, I did a lot of these kinds of falls. You need to fall at least a meter, like pure fall, at least a meter, probably a meter and a half to make it look decent.

And so that was the first one. And that was okay. On your neck. You fell on your knee. Oh, we're getting there. We're getting there, but not for lockdown, for the next one coming out. But yes, I had a thick mat. I did sort of roll to try and get on my shoulder, but that was okay.

That wasn't the worst. The worst was that the second iteration of this stunt was... It's always the advance. Yeah, the advance was to go, oh, you didn't have enough surface area on your shoes, so we're going to cover your whole body with lockdown. And this is what sounded like. To be fair, I don't think we can. blame the product there, Chaz. I think we just, that was an issue with surface area.

Obviously, we spread the glue too thin. We needed to put more of it on you. So next up, we coated Chaz's entire body in Superglue to make sure this time he'd definitely stick. All righty. There we are. Lovely lock tights. Good stuff. Guys, I don't think my face is going to be stuck to the seal. I'm pretty sure I've got enough.

Just not taking any chances. You know what happened last time? So the reason I played that bit there was so you could hear that. was so you could hear that I had my mouth filled with glue as well. Right? The other just, they literally coated my face and everything. Now, it wasn't real glue. This is TV. This is what I'm saying. You take precautions to to make things. Because otherwise, you would have been very high. Yeah, you would have been sniffing the glue. Yeah. And in hindsight, I wish I was hard. Because what we had instead was sugar

water, right? And that's a bit of a TV trick. When you want to do glue, you do sugar water. And lots of things, you make sugar water. Anything that could be transparent. That's a, that's a kill or so you can drink it and you're not going to you're not going to hurt yourself right okay this is the thing they don't tell you sugar water is fine to ingest if you're acting like it's say a like a cough medicine or something but it's sticky so when you coat someone with sugar with sugar water it acts like glue it was just glue oh my god and so they stuck me to the ceiling with the sugar

water. And what happened was it hardened around me and I want you imagine if you're

code head to toe with glue what that does to your body hair. Oh my gosh so I'm imagining like

basically like the glazed surface of a Krispy cream donut is all over your body at this point. Yeah, yeah

and I'm a bit of a yaddy right and if you think you do one take no you don't do one take you do 20

takes right and every single time you go up there Every single follicle is being ripped out of your skin, right? It was so bad. The other thing they don't tell you is when you're hanging from a ceiling, even a ceiling that's only a meter and a half in the air,

you need to support your legs. Man, no stuntman. They must have pretty good abs. Because I was doing that for two hours. My abs were absolutely cooked. And if I didn't, if I wasn't like a straight board, you know what happens? You rip out more follicles. The perfect torture.

Absolutely. And worst of all, since it was, since I was flat, they said at the time, oh, you don't need the mat for your neck. You don't need the mat for your neck because you're going to fall on your tummy. That's fine. Uh-oh. So they took out the map. But I fell over and over and over and over again.

In the end, I was so bruised. I was just covered in bruises. I had nobody here. I was hating the world. And I could barely get off in the shower. It was so, so unpleasant. And yet it made 30 seconds of very long. lame TV.

So that's the example I'm talking about, where it looks so innocuous. But man, it hurt. No one's thinking about their hair that's being ripped out when they see that stunt. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. I feel like you're the only person in the Chaser who did stunts where the actual impact on you was much worse than what we saw on camera. I was also thinking of a bit shit on camera, but actually you're in agony. Well, that is the case for that one.

But then, like I said, at the top of this podcast, there's the ones that never get to air because they go horribly, horribly wrong. And I've got two perfect examples. One, such an innocuous stunt. You know how pubs have been increasingly replacing performing artists and bands with pokies over the last few years. So the stunt was a very simple one, which was we were taking the next step on behalf of the pokies and replacing buskers with pokies as well. Simple stunt. So you just approach a busker. in a tunnel and act very rude

and try and try and move them on with a pokey. Very easy. No problems. What could go wrong? Let me tell you what could go wrong, my friends. What could go wrong is the busker that you happen to try and be rude to turns out to be crazy and turns out to have a knife and turns out to hold it to your neck.

And so he had me like a classic kind of like a movie with like with his arm around my throat and with one arm with one arm and the other hand with a knife to my neck, screaming just abuse at me and about how he was going to kill me. And at that point in time, we have a pretty well-worn technique, which is we all start screaming.

All the directors come out and everyone go, Canon camera, Candy camera, Candid cameras. We just talked them down like a rabid dog, just saying, candy camera, candy camera, figuring they probably don't watch the chaser if they're reacting like that. But he said the worst possible thing in relation to that particular scenario,

Which was he said, I know exactly who you are, Chaz. I'm going to fucking kill you. Oh, that's not good. That's not good. And so Nathan Earl, who is in all these stories, saved my life by talking this guy down very slowly for about 20 minutes. What did he say?

I don't even remember the detail. He was just been very, very calm and no sudden moves. And just talking him down, and it just turned out that this guy really hated our show. And we picked the wrong person to pull a stunt on. Of all the tunnels. That was always the tunnel that we shot in, too. It was certainly not a ton of love.

I assure you of that. So that one never went to air, guys. But that one, that was pretty scary. Yes. I'm just thinking, the ABC were pretty thorough with this. Every single time you went out and shot something, there was a very thorough risk assessment.

How the fuck did that risk assessment not get bus kids? turns out to be crazy. But hang on, hang on. Like, surely on every risk assessment there would have been a chance that somebody wants to kill Chaz because they hate the chaser. Admittedly, no risk assessment is complete without that line. They certainly, that was certainly on all the future risk assessments after that stunt. I show you.

Wow, I didn't hear that story. And there's another one, which also never got to air. And this one really hurt. And Charles hit on the key aspect of this before. but it was worse than what he suggested. Let me tell you the stunt. This was in that period at the end when I did the Botox one,

I was just throwing everything at the last few weeks. There was some things that the ABC would just wouldn't let me do. Like, for instance, I was hell-bent on being tortured. I wanted to recreate Gitmo. And the ABC just said, no, no, you're not doing that. And relations with them were a bit strained around that time, I recall, anyway. That is true, that's true, which is why they should have said yes. It's being tortured like Kimmo.

But anyway, they didn't. let that through. They let this one through. It was me, me road testing the Wii. Remember the Wii? Nintendo Wii. It's a very silly set of stunts, a little package where I was reenacting the skills you learn from Wii in real life to see if they make you very good at those particular skills. And of course, they're all stupid skills. It was a comedy segment. It wasn't an actual test. Anyway, so one of the, one of the elements on, um, on we is, uh, tightrope walking and so we thought yeah is this going to make you a champion tightrope walker so the joke was i'd go up to a tight rope i would put down the wee board on the tightrope and i'd stand on

the we board and obviously stack it because it's a we board it's not meant to be on a tightrope and i'd fall over on my head that's the joke right so of course we do the usual thing which we get the camera down low underneath and we and we look up and we try and make it as make the fall as as small as possible onto a mat, very, very thick mat, et cetera. The usual metre and a half or so like we normally do. This one is a little bit high about meter, meter 70, meter 80, something like that. And Charles made the correct observation before about when you do that kind of thing, aren't you going to land on your neck?

Well, here's the thing. You don't have to land on your neck. You can land on your shoulder before you get to your neck. But here's the problem. In mid-air, very difficult to adjust the speed of your spin, right? You have to guess how long, how much you're going to spin before you hit the ground. If you don't get perfectly right, you're going again.

And then you're going again, and then you're going again, and then you're going again. It just so happens that the tight rope was just that little bit higher than normal because we just have to get the right shot. And I kept on spinning past where I dropped out of the shot, right? And so landing, looking good, looking like you're almost going to land on your head in shot means that you are going to land on. your head in real life because you keep on spinning past the shot. We did about something like 23 or 24 takes from memory.

And most of the time, I kind of landed on my shoulder, but three times I did not. And you went back. Well, I had to get the shot. And just telling you mind that this is a peripheral for the we, the Wii balance board that was solved for one app called Wii Fit that nobody remembered or ever used. And you had to do that 23 times because of your own seat. Perfectionism. That's correct.

Oh, my God. How are you still alive? Well, after the third one, the third time I landed on my neck and I walked away with extreme tingles around my spine, I was wondering whether it was a good idea. In hindsight, you know what? Even then, the shot looked shit, which was the reason why you never saw it. But, man, my back was screwed for about three or four months. I was going to physio, physio. Your back's bad anyway.

The tingles didn't go for a while. And talking about tingles, wait for number one. Because that's not number one. I'm just imagining, Chas, having to, having to, like, you'll, like, the sort of in-memorium service and someone saying, you just really wanted the shot with the Nintendo Wheatel is for. See, see, you guys understand this, but the people... But it'll be the 23rd take of his funeral.

You guys understand this, but the people at home will not understand this, and you'll have to vouch me on this. That is as scary as quadriplegia is, it's not as scary as going back to the group and saying, I have a three-minute hole in this week's show. That is the scariest possible prospect, because you've got three days to fill that three minutes. And man, they are going to kill you! So, yeah, so I had to fill that hole. And in the end, I didn't anyway.

Oh, my God. Thanks for paying the bills, Chessie. A pleasure. This is my therapy, John, because this one, this sucks. This is the only time I have ever received permanent damage from a chaser stunt. To this day, I have permanent physical damage. Now, as you'll see, the damage now is pretty lame. But it's still there 10 years later.

That's the important thing, right? Let me tell you the story. This is going to take a little while, but it's a doozy. Okay. There was a stunt that got to air, which seemingly innocuous stunt, as they always are. I'm going to play the setup of the stunt because it was very visual. They don't describe what happened. Now, Jules, as you know, I'm a walker and not a driver,

and as someone who pretty much walks everywhere, I have to say, I find motorists very annoying. Yeah, well, that's because we've got no respect for pedestrians like you. No respect at all. They're always honking at you or screaming at you or honking at other cars. Everyone's on the bloody horn. Yeah, I think that's what you call road rage. I'll tell you what, I have a problem with road rage.

But my problem is, why is it only confined to motorists? It's about time us pedestrians had a way of taking out our own. Aggression. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.

Hell to the mail, grandma. Stuckney walkers. Who's are you the lock, Stephen Hawking? Okay, so what you're hearing there is me with a very complicated homemade setup. It's like a backpack with a steering wheel in front of me and lights flashing car lights and a horn, as you can hear. And it's basically like a car, except for it's around my body. And it's powered by a car battery, which is in the backpack. Very, very complicated device there is because it's homemade.

Lots of wires everywhere. A car battery is incredibly heavy. It is incredibly heavy. It was a 15 kilo car battery in this backpack. And it just so happened that people always confuse, people always get my dimensions wrong. I'm bigger than people think. They think I'm very tiny. Yes, I am very short.

But I'm thicker than you think. And so the clothes are always too tight. And the backpack was also too tight. This backpack was too tight. And so even when I was on as loosest, I was constantly having the blood cut off in my arms. I had to take it off. I could only use it for a minute or two at a time,

do a few shots and then take it off for a while and then keep on going, right? And the thing was, I couldn't take it off myself because there was so many wires around me. I would electrocute myself if I tried to take it off. So I had to have the props guy came with us and would then take it off. I kind of love that we managed to build this incredibly ridiculous machine

but didn't get it to be the right size. Yeah, yeah. And so that was a setup, okay? The setup was me running around with this. And actually, if anyone who is familiar with this stunt, which won't be many people, it's not very famous, but anyone who's familiar would think that where I'm going with this is the final scene,

which actually involved me running through a car wash. Yes, I physically ran through a car wash because I was trying to cool down from my pedestrian rage, right there and i went straight through with all the the rollers and everything i went straight through i had a i had a a little camera on on my shoulder filming my face being being ravaged by those rollers that wasn't a problem that wasn't a problem once again looks dangerous it was fine the problem was this we as part of this stunt one of the places we went i thought it'd be funny to go into a cinema and to and to start honking the trailers going hurry up 14 minutes of

bloody ads, ah, hurry up. Like, and we got the shot, whatever. Okay.

So we have to get the right ad because these are the kind of things which you guys probably don't realize. When you're filming in a cinema,

for instance, you need to have a bright light. Otherwise, you can't see the shot. It's too dark. So you need to wait for an ad, which is mostly white

in order to get the shot. Not all ads are white. So we have to actually go to lots of ads to get the right ad. So we're going from cinema to cinema, obviously someone's seeing

in cinema honking a horn yelling at a, at the screen is going to get people's attention. So we had to keep on running from the, from the ushers. We go to one of those theatres where there were lots of cinemas and just run from one to the other, right? That's the way, that's Chase's style, right? Anyway, so we got the shot, but at that moment, we got, we got sprung and the, and we had to do what I've told you in previous podcasts.

When you get, when you're in trouble the law, you split in different directions. That's what we did, at least. So we all split in different directions, hid everywhere. Oh, no. You can see where this is going, maybe. I hid in the women's toilets. That's chase his style. And the director hid somewhere else.

And we all hid somewhere else. And it just happened that that usher was, and the security guard were very dogged in trying to chase us down. And so people had to hide for a long time. You might recall the bit I told you about how long I could keep that backpack on my body, which was about two or three minutes, right? And I was, I was hiding for a long time and was just waiting for someone. They all knew they had to come and get me, but they were still hiding. And so we had to wait until the usher cleared before someone could come out and find me, right?

It's just, and what I found as I was waiting there is that I tried to prop up the backpack against the toilet paper dispenser that takes some of the weight. Yeah, yeah. Didn't really work. It was still just so tight. And so what I found was I discovered what happens after pins and needles because my blood got cut off and then I started getting pins and needles. and then I started getting this, this, it got completely numb and then after numb. You didn't even, you probably never,

no, no, you've never experienced this. After numb, you get this creeping death gradually from your fingertips going all the way. Just this intense, like it's been chopped by a knife all the way up your arms, right? And they've got all the way up, both my arms and, and your limbs are dying, basically. Yeah, and I couldn't feel anything after that creeping death. So after it went past my hands, my hands, they weren't numb, they felt like they weren't there, right? And the, and it took 45 minutes before they got me, right?

And at that- Just, why didn't you just take off the backpack? He couldn't. It was so tightly estranged. I couldn't. I would risk electrocution if I took it off. Oh, my God. Because I was tightly wound with wires, right?

Yeah, right. Yeah, right. This is like the plot of fucking sore. And it took about a week and a half for me to gain any motion back in my hands. And what did the ABC say? I didn't tell the ABC. I just went to the doctor. It's just the last thing I wanted to do is go to the ABC because what they'll tell me is to not make the show.

And can you imagine the hole they'll be left in the show if I don't even appear in it? Yeah, yeah. That would be like three seconds of material. That would be like a sensible response to situation. Probably better material as it turns out. Anyway, it turns out the nerve... They'd have to fill it with something more popular. It turns out that I had severe nerve damage, but nerves regrow.

Kind of. And so the reason I say it's permanent is to this day, my little finger in my left hand is half numb. Wow. Always. So that one there. Yeah, that one there. That one there.

I mean, yeah, it's not like I can't feel you when you touch it, but it's really quite numb. It's like you've got a migraine or something. It's like, yeah, yeah. It's like my left pinky is drunk all the time. I mean, I've heard of suffering for your art, but suffering for the chaser is not a great thing. And I know saying, oh, my left pinky is kind of drunk. It's the lamest form of permanent injury.

But, man, that really hurt for a very long period of time. You can now swap war stories with evil caneval. Well, yeah, it's just, it's the worst I've got, I'm afraid. If we made another season, I'm sure I pray we're having. have all my limbs, but yeah. But anyway, so that is the number one most pain I've ever been in, in my life, and for the chaser. That was amazing, Chaz, as always, I'm, and this is decades long,

I'm simultaneously struck by awe, admiration and just a sense that you're a fucking idiot. Our gear is from road microphones. We're part of the A-Cast Created Network. And tomorrow we're back with another interview. with a member of the Chaser team about all the hijinks in years gone past. That'll enjoy. That one will involve less physical pain, I'm almost certain.

See ya.