The Chaser Report - WAR STORIES: Craig vs The Pope

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

This Summer The Chaser Report gives you... WAR STORIES!Craig Reucassel stops by to join our Summer Stunt Series and talk about some of his favourite Chaser moments, who unlike Charles and Dom actually wants to forget all his old stunts. Together they help Craig forget stunts like when he flew a blimp in Vatican City, when he crashed a Liberal election party, and when Craig first got arrested, by talking about them in keen detail. 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 episode of The Chaser Report. And look, we're definitely here doing these every day. Charles Firth and I and Dom Knight have just been spending the entire summer, coming in every single day and talking to a different member of the Chaser team about adventures over the years. It's not as though we did them all in December in a giant block. Is it Craig Rucastell? So I've just been called in here so you fuckers can go to the beach.

Yeah. This is an outrage. Come in at night and everyone. morning, do an episode, and then fuck off to the beach. So can you come in for the rest of the week at 9 a.m? Sure, yeah, sure, sure. All right. So we're going to have our first chat with Craig of the summer in a moment here on the Chaser Report.

The Chaser Report, news you know you can't trust. So Craig, we've been talking a lot about stunts. And I was trying to think back on some of the ones that you've done. And fuck, there's a lot to choose from. There are. The interesting thing about that is that I forget most of them and they get reminded by other people. but there are some key ones that... And this is basically Craig's role in The Chaser

is doing amazing stunts and just making us feel small. Yeah, it's a good role. I don't know which was the more key to your part of the operation, but... So, but you were saying, you have, you do the stunts and then you forget about them.

In some cases, there are a lot of pissy little stunts that were done that you look back at them and they were pretty shit-outs. But, yeah, I think one of the things that became a bit of a pain in a sense is that the lesson you got after years of doing it was that often things that seemed incredibly unlikely to work

ended up working and that was great but it also meant that you would often put an enormous amount of time to things where it was never going to work as well because you'd learnt this lesson going oh this is rubbish but I guess there was that time you know and that was kind of built so yeah the long shots come off and so you just keep doing long shots yeah but you've always got to be it's always yes long shots come off, but they never come off the way you exactly want them to. So one of the first stunts with Dom, you were one of the cameramen on this particular stunt, was the race card in the 2001 election, right?

First series we ever made, and it was the climax of the series. Yeah, exactly. And it was basically the Liberal Party headquarters or Liberal Party celebration on the night of winning the election, yeah. And the whole point of that election was that it was incredibly racist election. This is the Tampa election. This is the Tampa election. It was the really first great race election.

Yeah. We decide who comes into our country. Since every election, you know, during the White Australia policy up until about 1972. Exactly. And it wasn't just one-sided. I mean, we'd already during this campaign done a stunt in Canberra where we'd got politicians to kind of beat up a refugee, you know, all concept was. And both, like, Mark Latham had smashed me with a rubber bat. And it was, you know, we were kind of saying, look, everyone in this election, let's face it is being incredibly racist.

You know, those that had some shame just dog whistled it, the others just would be racist. So we decided on the night I'd got dressed up in a Lycra suit and kind of big cards. Playing card, yeah. Playing cards with a race card written on it. And the whole idea was it burst in and go, yeah, we won, we won the selection. We did it together. Very, yeah, it's a physical representation of a metaphor. That's what we love at the chase.

Take a metaphor and make it into a giant prop. Exactly. It was a great prop. It was fantastic. Yes. But the interesting, so this night, we thought the only way we're going to get. get into this. We booked a tiny room in the Wentworth Hotel. Like, it was the smallest room possible. And so we went in with all the crew cameras. We had three cameras there.

Yeah. We had a couple of sound and we were literally all just crushed in this tiny room for hours on end waiting and waiting until we finally, to basically John Howard was going to come on the stage and that's when we go down and do it. And it's a little bit like, a little bit like the kind of, you know, when people go down to the Arctic regions and you've got to separate all your crews, in case one falls down a crevasse, we're like, hey, we're going to separate different camera crews, going to go at different times, getting to different lifts to make sure there's

something there. Dom, you were one of the first crew that went out there. Yeah, I was there. I think I was in the same lift as the ABC, like full-on professional camera crew and sound recordist. And, you know, so we put quite a few cameras in the lift. And so we went down. The thing was, we couldn't

buzz down to the level where the function center was. And, you know, quite a secure hotel. You couldn't, a guest couldn't go in. security there, which we had no idea. To the kitchen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we got in the lift, not realizing this, and I went in with one camera crew, Kevin May, who's very, very experienced ABC cameraman. Somebody just happened to press, you know, they wanted to go up when we got in.

So we got straight out onto the level, barreled straight down to this thing. And, you know, basically did the whole stunt. We went in there, people were initially, because we were kind of celebratory, yeah, we've won this election. Everyone was like cheering along with us. And then at a certain period, they started realizing, oh, he's saying the race card won the election. Yeah, and they realized finally it was bad. And there were people throwing beer on me.

I think Pierce Ackerman was there throwing beer. I was not a huge surprise. Let's have a quick listen to the audio of Craig bursting out onto the ballroom floor. We've won it. We did it. Guys, congratulations, well done. We've done it. We've done it.

We've done it. We've got together and we've done it. Yeah. Yes. We've won this. John and I are really proud of this one. Yeah, this is a big picture of us. I'm invited.

John told me to come. I played an important part of this campaign. I played the most important part of this campaign, and now you're throwing me out. Absolutely. No respect. We only realized at the end, so I got to kind of right near the stage,

and I couldn't go any further. I was like, I turned to Kevin and said, I don't have anything to say. He was like, just say it again. And luckily, security came to my rescue there, just hoits me out and pretty much threw me out, pushed me down the stairs and threw me out. And the great thing if you watch the back is Kev kind of,

as I got pushed down the stairs, he's filming from behind me. And then he runs down in front to get a second shot. What a professional. He goes backwards down the stairs while I'm being hoiked out. And of course, we get to the end of this going, that was the most fun. And then we see these guys just standing out,

so I going, yeah, we missed the whole thing. But Kev was so good, it was all in one shot. Yeah. And the amazing thing, I guess that then formed the chaser stunt, which is the traditional end of any chaser stunt is getting kicked out by security. It is right, yeah. And seen, yeah, and seen.

But it was that thing of going, lots of things went wrong, but it kind of came off. It was such dumb luck that someone pressed up and you managed to get out on the thing. And that's kind of been the lesson so many times is you kind of go, oh, this is not going to work, but should we just give up? I mean, it led to a very terrible time where I remember,

I can't remember why this. We were sitting outside Gretel Colleen's place, so I don't know, all workplace or whatever. I think there'd been some big brother scandal and we were going to do something stunned. And Andrew and I was sitting out the back in the car for hours on end. You cannot piss, you cannot leave.

Andrews fell asleep. It was just the worst period. And you're going, and, you know, you're going... Well, hang on, why can't you piss? Well, what if that's the moment where somebody comes? And, you know, and also you're in a, probably a residential area where it's not like you can just go piss on someone's car and but but this is the thing is you kind of go in any world i'm going to call this off but you go

oh i guess there was that time that worked yeah yeah and i guess it was like being in the big brother house right like you're absolutely trapped there you couldn't move anywhere else and there were cameras yeah yeah yeah yeah but that's why and i ended up having sex uh much like the big brother house yeah jumping duner yeah that but it's interesting was the the the example where i think so many things went wrong before something working was the when we went to fly a blimp over the Vatican in Rome. Oh, yes. And a great idea of Chris Taylor's, which is, well, we went through a lot of different

ideas. We, you know, we were going to broadcast stuff on the side of the Vatican. Turned out that can't be done. But the final idea was we had this blimp and it was going to test whether they'd solved pedophilia in the Catholic Church. So it had a rope hanging off it. and it had a giant, like on the side of a giant blimp was written, young boys inside, pull down if you want one.

The theory being, if they hadn't sold pedophilia in the Catholic church, that all of the priests would run out and pull the blimp down. Which is kind of great, because it was written in English. You're there in an Italian-speaking environment. And you're wanting a priest to go, hey, I'm going to pull this thing down. Yeah. Well, you never know. I mean, the bilingual, I mean, I don't see any flaw with the idea.

I mean, I'm just going to say it was before George Pell was at the Vatican. This is true. This is true. But we... Because he spoke English, not for any other reason. Oh, right. Just to be clear. Oh, oh.

Yeah. Look at the old George Pell's biographer over here. It wouldn't be a bad book. It was fun, too, because it was remote controlled. So you just sort of flew it around and... Well, so I'd literally learnt to fly in Australia at a cricket. picket pitch and like, how big was the blimp? The blimp was about, I'd say, like, 15 metres long.

It's quite a big blimp. And you were flying it. And I had to fly it. He had the remote control in his hands in the stunt. That's the beautiful thing. This is the bizarre thing. So what happened is we're in the Baton. How is that legal?

It's bizarre. Like, we sent this blimp over and we like picked it up. And I had to then drive to the edge of like Rome to get a giant, you know, a helium container right. Now, and this becomes quite important later, a giant helium container looks quite bombish. Oh, yes. Quite bombish. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, even though helium's an inert gas that wouldn't expose at all. It was actually very safe. Ironically. Yes, it doesn't look that way. You couldn't have detonated any pedophile priests that day. So we literally filled this thing and we hired this giant truck. Did you, did you also make your voices go,

Oh my father? That would have really confused him. He would have loved that. They would have suddenly been all attracted to you. Exactly. You've got to be careful. That's why Helium's dangerous in the Vatican. So we got this giant truck.

We initially hired a truck that wasn't quite big enough. This is where everything went wrong. It wasn't quite big enough. So we pumped up the thing and it wouldn't fit in it. So we went, oh, we said, can we have a bigger truck? Yeah, exactly. Can we have a bigger truck? And as I took back the one truck, the like large,

but not large enough truck in the middle of Italy to the higher place I parked it by scrape it alongside the new truck I was picking Oh no But it was great

I thought this is going to be the biggest blowout of the budget And it was like This is Italy So they just Just perceived to be normal parking They could not charge to be one cent It's great

It's great So we pump up this giant blimp In the back of the truck And we decide And because the helium canister looks like a bomb to leave it in our hotel room. And so we head off to the Vatican. And we know the Pope is landing that day and is going to come into the Vatican. By blimp.

Yeah, we want to kind of get it when he's coming into the Vatican. Wow. Yeah, so we know, so he's kind of, but so we go and we're kind of hidden by the Vatican with this giant truck with a blimp in the back of it, just sitting there. And Pope is late. He's running late. Bloody Pope, he's not here yet. They don't really move with the times.

I don't mean at the times. So we then go, I only went and check the blimp, and it's going down. It's got a hole in it. Oh, no. So I'm crawling around in the back of this truck going, I don't know where the hole is. Maybe someone had tried to penetrate it. Hang a sec. This is the episode with beer, by the way.

At 9 a.m. It took this morning, yeah. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. So we're there in the back of this thing. We find the hole, fix it with, like, tape in the back of the truck, just by the Vatican. And we realize this is, it's lost too much air at this point. So we're going to have to drive back and get the helium canister. So we hop foot back to the hotel, get it, pump it up, get the bomb.

And this time we're like, we can't leave this in the hotel. We might need it again. So we strap it in the back of the truck. Oh, no. With some wires. With it, with an alarm. In hindsight. So it shouldn't have hung our alarm clock off it.

It could have been like nerve gas or anything. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it just looked really bad. But this is, but again, where things, you know, when everything goes wrong, sometimes it goes incredibly right. We start driving back. I think, oh shit, hope the Pope hasn't arrived and gone in. We start driving back.

You know, Rome traffic, nightmare, right? We get into this road with this giant truck. And we are just like, this is incredible. We've never seen so little traffic. We're driving down this road. to the Vatican. This is going, this is great,

we're going to get back here and so quickly. And as we're driving, we see all these police cars at the side roads basically stopping traffic. What has happened by some bizarre coincidence

is we're like one of the last cars to get onto the road that the Pope is about to come back down and that they blocked all the traffic on. And little do they know that these police are just blocking you out with this truck that has a giant like... Pedophile blink.

And this is, I mean, to be, I don't know, want to joke about it, but the Pope, there have been assassination attempts on the Pope, it's quite a serious security situation. And they're like, oh, look, wave the white to be dragged through before your Papa gets back.

So we get there, a Pope arrives back. We swing open the doors to the back of the thing. I get out the remote control, flat out. I nearly crashed it in the first two seconds. After months of planning, it comes out, it goes hammering towards the ground, I pull up at the

last minute it flies up into the air, you know, flies around the Vatican. And it was amazing because there's just all of these cops and a lot of military officials because it's kind of, you know, it's cross-border. This is one of the things the lawyers told us before. He said, technically, the Vatican is its own country. So this is a cross-border issue. You're flying across borders. A red notice sort of situation.

And you know, the traditional Swiss Guard in the Vatican who've been there for centuries? I think that, don't they have like sharp, like, sharp, like, like pikes, so they could easily sort of stab the blimp and popped it. Well, likely it was high enough at this point. But so all these people turn up with guns, but they can't tell what it is. You know, they're running around trying to figure out where this thing's coming from, well, we're just trying to fly it around the Vatican. But I guess also it was well disguised because a blimp that said pull down for young boys,

like it could easily have been an official Vatican. Exactly. Yeah, they're only suspicious when they went, hang on it's not also written in Latin. So they finally see this truck with his doors flung open and these guys come over with like this big AK-47 type things. And that's when I was like, oh, fuck, this is the helium. This just looks like we're trying to blow off the place with this helium thing sitting in the bag.

And we just kind of immediately gave it. You know, we're like, yeah, no, fine. We're just TV show, funny, funny Australian TV show. Candid camera, candid camera. And this is the funny thing because in Australia by that point, you could just say Chaser and everyone would know who you were. But yeah, in the Vatican, how would they possibly know who you were? Well, it didn't, and this is the amazing thing is that we then got arrested

and just spent the next, I can't even remember how long it was, we got hauled between different police stations and this kind of lockup facility jail place. Were you in Rome or were you in the Vatican? Because there are two completely separate. Well, no, we were parked on the Italian side, so we weren't picked up by the Italian cops. Probably so you can at least bribe them. Oh, it's funny you say that, Charles. It is very funny you say that.

I realized, I reckon six months later, that I am an idiot and that I'm just not used to being in that kind of world. Like, I realised later, because they kept doing this weird thing, though, like 10 cops right. And they kept sticking their hands out. Well, there's one dude that could speak English

and he was trying to be the good cop. And they kept coming in and trying to have these chats and go, oh, television, hey, oh, must make a lot of money. Oh, yeah, I see. We're police, you know, no much money. And I think it was just chatting. I'm going, yeah, I mean, public broadcasting, trying to explain to them, the ABC position. We're just having, thinking of conversations, literally six months later, I went,

oh, fuck, they were over and asking for a bride. I think in the end, the only reason we got out is they got to the point, like they drove us through the streets of Italy at a fucking 200 kilometers an hour in this car, it's out to this jail thing. I think by the end of it, they're just like, this guy's too fucking stupid to let him go. There is no way we can get money out of this tube the bastard. That's very funny. It really was such an incredibly audacious thing.

And the thing about Italy, and I know this is, you know, my aunt used to live there and she explained it, is they've got regular police, but they've also got this incredibly terrifying military police called like the Caribbean area or something. And they're the ones with the AK-47s. And they are terrifying, and they would have been the ones who got you. They were initially the ones that picked us up. But then we seem to be handed over to a normal police.

They sort of realized, oh, no. these guys aren't any for three. There was another great, our director at the time, we had this approach at the time, another great staff up, which was really funny at the time, is that cameras at the time, video cameras are kind of switching between being a tape and a card.

So they'd have both. Yes. So what we'd do is we'd film on the tape, we'd film like just walking around the Vatican and so it looked all innocent. And then you'd film the stunt on the card, and then you'd switch back to the tape and you'd flick, basically,

when we got arrested, you take the card out, right? So at this time, I'm arrested with our director, and he's like, you know, quietly, subtly kind of winking me, don't worry about, I've got this card. Now, at the time, it wasn't USB cards. It was like about the size of a playing card with metallic edges and that.

So he's kind of like looking down his underpants, kind of nodding going, it's okay, I've got it there. He's got this extremely jagged card in his underpants. I think it's all fine. They bring in the camera and go, Okay, we want you to explain this, what's going with the footage. I start rolling it, and he's going, it's all right. This is just us walking around the Vatican, you know, it's not going to be on there.

And then it just keeps going. He's forgotten to switch over the card. So not only do they have all of the footage there, he's currently sitting with an extremely jagged thing sticking into his balls that has zero data on it has no use whatsoever. Elsewhere this summer we will hear the story about how I completely fucked up recording the nudes stunts at Burwood Local Court. I'm very glad that I'm not the only person who made this sort of mistake.

Yeah, exactly. It was quite difficult. It was quite fiddly because you were so stressed. But you got the footage back. We ended up getting the footage back. How did you get the footage back? Well, amazingly, we actually had a huge backup. So we had several cameramen that, or different cameras in that that got away.

And basically, we just stalled while they backed all up these tapes and then put them in to basically send them out of the country. Yeah, people posted them, didn't they? They posted them. And then finally it got to the point where once it was all safe, we said, oh, okay, this is the hotel we're staying at. They took us there. We met up with other people from the whole, you know,

from the, from the chaser and everything. And a few more people got arrested. Jules and Trinidadonald got arrested as well at that point. They were actually so incompetent that they said they were waiting at one and we said there was people at the other one. And they didn't even take the other one. And after about literally 45 minutes of just, waiting around. We said, and they just was smoking the whole time. We just went, look, why don't we

just walk to the other hotel and we can get to this so we can actually get out of this being arrested? I mean, I'm sure they're very competent when you offer them bribes. I'm sure that system works beautifully well. In hindsight, in hindsight. But in the end, in the end, like months later, the once the legal trial kind of went ahead and they, they actually sent us back the other footage as well. So we end up getting all the tapes. Was there a trial, like in absentia? Oh, no, it wasn't a trial, but as in what's all the kind of legal process when we got all the tapes back.

And the great irony of this, despite being one of the most complex and difficult stunts to pull off, is that actually for TV, it wasn't very good. It wasn't a very good stunt, no. Just a blip flying around. Yeah, really shit's done. But anyway, great stuff behind the seats. If only you'd filmed that. And how many people pulled the rope?

In the end, they'd solved pedophilia in the Catholic Church. No one pulled it down. Yeah, no young boys were harmed in the filming of that. But Nathan Ell's balls were. in. So that's fun. Our gears from road microphones. We're part of the ACAS creator network. We'll have another one of these for you tomorrow morning.

Catch you then. See ya.