The Chaser Report - Welding For Dummies

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

With war raging in Ukraine the team share a genuine moment of sincerity and reflect on why it's important to not be too quick to make jokes about horrible events. Aleksa takes this as an opportunity to highlight sensationalist journalism happening from other outlets. Plus a look behind the scenes of our latest stunt! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chase of Report. Hello and welcome to The Chase of Report for Monday the 28th of February. I'm Charles Firth. I'm Gabby Bolt. I'm Alexne. And I'm Lachlan. Look, it's a bit of a serious day here because war has broken out between Russia and the Ukraine. And we just want to be very upfront that we're not going to make jokes about the really quite serious and horrible stuff that's going on in the Ukraine.

It's really horrible. But, Charles, as you've taught us, comedy is just tragedy plus timing. Yes. And you have frequently subverted that formula previously. Are you aware of some of the things that you've said about this war before that it's actually happened? I mean, we have been talking about it in the last few weeks, but I don't think there's anything... Like, I think we've been trading it with the sort of seriousness that it deserves. You don't think that there's the gravitas that it requires.

Yeah, that's right. I think so. You don't think there's anything that Charles, you might have said that might be a bit out of touch or might not have aged well? I can't. You've obviously got something. Let's see if we can rejog your memory. Whatever.

Like, maybe he will eventually invade. But I'm going to have nothing to watch. I was assuming that straight after the Olympic Games, we would get a sort of good war to watch, at least for the next few months. No. Nothing. No. Like, and the stock footage, they were playing it on the TV this morning, you know, showing the withdrawals

and things like that. It's all fucking weeks old footage of people doing training exercises. Right. This was recorded on the day of the invasion. No, no, no. That was recorded a fair few weeks before things happened. And we can forgive that. And also, look, it sounded flippant, but remember, there wasn't a war on at the time.

Right. So, yeah. I mean, it's not like war was even. There was actually, in fairness, there was actually as the Russian troops were withdrawing from the front. And we thought it was all over. So it was perfect time for. comedy, in Venus. It's not like you then said anything, I don't know, maybe an hour before the first missiles were

shot, was it? Charles, did you say something an hour before the missiles were shot? We were, we were, we did record an episode just before the war happened, but, and was about Ukraine, but let's, let's take a listen to what Charles Firth said one hour before missiles first struck. I thought by now we would have World War III that there'd be something to watch. I mean, there's no war at all. I didn't really predict very well.

No. No, I think we've all learned something here. Let's maybe not make jokes about topics that could potentially age very badly. Well, we spent a whole week saying the Queen was dead. Yeah. And she didn't die. No, she's still alive. I can confidently say that as of this moment. Queen still alive. And that means we can probably also make jokes about Clive Palmer having COVID. I mean, not that that's funny in and all of itself. It's a bit funny. These are going to make for excellent sound bites. Coming up on the show, Alexa, Yes, there are some hot takes about Ukraine. No, we just said we weren't going to joke about the war.

Not ours, right? We don't joke about this stuff, but a whole lot of news outlets around the world have had a field day with it. Oh, right, okay. And also, we tried to break into a Scott Morrison press conference last week. Oh, shit. And we got the down low on how that all unfolded. All that and more coming up. But first of all, Rebecca Day and Amuno in the Jason Newsroom.

Thanks, Gabi. People around the world. have reacted with an exhausted sigh of you fucking idiot today after learning one of the idiots in charge of things have once again made everyone's life worse right when everything was getting back to normal the idiot has defended their idiocy saying they simply could not have gone on without invading another country because that has historically panned out so well for dictators and certainly won't make everything a billion times worse for both his citizens and everyone in Ukraine. Unvaccinated independent researcher Clive Palmer has declared from his hospital bed that there

was absolutely nothing he could have done that would have stopped him from falling severely ill with COVID-19. Palmer exclaimed that it is not his fault. There is no scientific method for preventing severe illness from a disease and that his team at UAP will fund all the research they can to see if such a magical cure exists. The Good Year Company has today filed for bankruptcy following the third class action lawsuit in three years with every single person on planet Earth claiming damages for false advertising. Meanwhile, the Nice Biscuit Company is also facing legal action

over claims their biscuits are only nice if you enjoy the taste of chalk. Those are the latest headlines from The Chaser Report. I'm Rebecca Dayunamuno. So, Alex, the war's been going on now for about four or five days. A couple days, yeah. It's not very pleasant. Why are we talking about it on this comedy podcast? Well, I think because there's nothing else to talk about.

But also, there are a few hot takes from a couple of politicians, a few news outlets. Like terrible hot things. Yeah, yeah. Worse than Charles's that we just heard. Charles is just a man looking for some entertainment. You had Trump. This would have been like, you know, 12 hours before. the missiles went out, he called Putin a genius.

Oh, no. For sending a peacekeeping force into Donbass. A peacekeeping force? Mm-hmm. Doesn't seem like a thing that should exist, does it? It's nice of Trump to stick by an ex. Yeah. You know?

Yeah, co-parenting is lovely. You think it was in order to sort of try and tempt Putin back? Like, you think it was to... Baby, come back. I've got an election coming up. You can rig this one for me too. Straight after the invasion, there were much worse takes, surprisingly. What do you mean?

So Donald Trump Jr. gone on to Twitter and said, maybe it's time we start worrying about real shit instead of our pronies. What? As in the war should be what we're worrying about, not gender. Oh my God. So it was sort of like... See, this is what you get when you worry about pronouns.

Yeah, right, right. No, because as Steve Bannon said... The woke brigade has made Putin do it. No, well, he was saying, like Steve Batten came out and said, Putin ain't woke, he's anti-woke, the Russians know which bathroom to use, they know how many genders there are. I think it's like, we need to get back, we need to be more like Russia. That is, that's hot.

That's a hot, that's a hot take. Spicy. But we had some slightly less spicy ones. We had some in Australia. Of course we did. Which were pretty on point. Oh, God. Herald's unwrote an article and it goes,

With all the talk of missiles in Eastern Europe, a woman chucked a tantrum in an epping shop and threw a missile of her own, a fully cooked chook. Oh, no, see, that's good, because they're trying to get into the topical slipstream. Oh. You know, they said, we didn't anticipate a war, but we need to make all the articles relevant to this. Is that, is that not an attempt at a satirical headline?

Because you tell us all the time, it's like, you've got to link in issues that don't seem linked, and that sounds like that. Do you know what really fucks me up about that, though? I know that we shouldn't be reading the Herald Sun, but you know what I want to read about? What the fuck happened with that chook? Yeah, what's the chuk missa? How did it go? Yeah.

Did it fall apart? Did it stay together? Did it hit someone in the face? Was it bare bagged? Alexa, can you please enlighten us? No, no. I honestly did not read the article. I could have been myself to do it.

We had a really good journalist's integrity at CNN and Fox News by that matter. Lovely. Good. Good for them. So they had rolling coverage of air raid sirens all over Kiev and this is what it sounded like. That's horrible. And a little bit of chicken What?

So in the middle of it, there's a pair of jeans that fit just right. What's the middle of it? In the middle of it, they had an ad for Applebee's. And then so, like, the screen says, like, horror, you know, invasion of Ukraine. And then, like, that screen is on the side to see Kiev, like, getting bombed. And then the big Applebee's ad. Do they sell chicken Kiev? Probably.

I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist but chicken has come up far too much in this discussion. And Fox News are the same thing and CNN did it again. They had an ad come up for like some tropical resort so I think somewhere in Cancun

and the song was Baby don't worry About a thing And just like unhinged product placement Why is their product placement in the news? I mean it's a great move though because all I can think about is Applebee's And I've never even eaten there

And you've got to realise This is boom time for those 24 hour news channels Like war is a huge ratings driver because it makes terrific television. Oh, yeah. And of course, you've got to have, this is going to pay the bills for CNN, Foxy. The ones that I hated the most, and these are kind of the lukewarm ones, because they were essentially saying the right thing. All these people coming out to condemn Russia, you just had a lot of, like,

really horrible Americans trying to score points. Like, you have Mitt Romney coming out and be like, this is the worst aggression we've ever seen since World War II. Like, international orders, he's destroyed international order. like everything's wrong and it's just like broken all the rules like this guy voted for the iraq war like he's directly responsible yeah i was gonna say have they forgotten the last 20 years or like is that just i think when he says this is the worst act of aggression since world war two there's a big asterisk that says that wasn't instigated by the u s yeah or it's like the worst

aggression we've seen that's because they just closed their eyes when they gunned everybody else down presumably the act of aggression in world war two was not the bombing of hiroshima and Nakasaki. Yeah. Fuck it now. The Chaser Report. Less news. Less often.

So before we go, Alexer and John, last week, you tried to sneak into a Scott Morrison press conference. What happened? Yeah. Spoiler, like we weren't successful. But it's not for lack of trying. We gave it a good go for about 20 minutes. They're so secretive with this stuff. Like, you need to have.

a mole in the inside to tell you when it's happening in like 45 minutes beforehand they're like Scott's giving a press conference at this building and then we like got our shit together. I wanted to go there and give him a copy of welding for dummies as you know just looking out for him and you know we got there on time

it was all good. Yeah where was it? It was the chief plea building wasn't it? It was one Bly Street. Yeah. Big big old circular building and it's all locked off like you need key cards to just get through the turnstiles to get the elevators. But you did you got key goes yeah we just asked for some and um well that's pretty easy yeah so we just said we were the

was from the media and asked where is the press conference and they let us see and they told us how to get there they gave us um cards like floor 21 so far so good like we didn't even know what floor it was on she's just like yeah floor 21 here let me give you some key cards yeah all they did was they asked us for our photo ID and we just sort of just told them any details we assumed they might ask for and it completely worked but um but that was was only one part of the defences. When we got up there, there were just like all these AFP guys. And they were like, oh, you know, you need media accreditation. Where is it? We're trying to play it. I'm like, oh, yeah, sure. Look, I'll just call my boss and like get him

to send it through. Like, it'll be fine. Like, where are you from? We're from the shot. And like, what the hell's that? They know what shots are the AFP? Yeah, exactly. And they're asking for business cars. It felt like we almost had a chance. Like, one of them was kind of on our side. he's like, oh, you know, don't worry about it. You're not late. Like, it'll be fine. Like, it's all a formality. We got to have a good chat with Scott Morrison's media person.

She came out to have a chat with us and see what was going on. And she seemed very confused. And then, so I just said that the shot was from Melbourne and it's new and it aims at young people. And then so she sort of seemed to believe that. And she's like, I'll be back in three minutes. I need to clear something up. And then from that point, some of the police officers seemed like they were like, okay, we can. We can that, saw this out.

And then there was, while Zander was on the phone to Charles trying to see if we can make up, how we can make up accreditation for the shot to be into a press conference, we weren't allowed in. One other cop who hadn't been there at that point just comes up and directly asks us, did you guys sneak in through the service elevator? Yeah, but it started to get suspicious. But then the police officers who were in charge, who were in charge, of like man in the gate were like

no they just came through that elevator so they also clearly didn't tell the other police officers that this guy had caught on so they were like that the AFP it might have been it was the their protection so the prime minister's protection would be federal police

yeah and then were their state police there as well it's hard to tell they all look like cops to me yeah I didn't ask I didn't really think they're asking them which department they're in would be the best move the way to tell is that the New South Wales police just have the brown paper bags

like open in the front pocket. Oh, I see. Whereas the AFP tend to just take credit card. New South Wales police are normally looking for a team to strip search. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, that's what we should do next time

is just take along some young bait. Yeah, Zander would be purveyed and distract them by saying, oh, you can strip search Zander, and then we can just get in. I think we learned a lot from this, this blunder on top of, on top of the strip searches. We only had one. It's true. Gabby's looking appalled.

That is true. That's what the Newtown Police get off on. They love it. They love a good strip search. Yeah. Will they let us see in after the strip search? Oh, wait a minute. Zanda might be a bit too old.

He's like 20, isn't it? He also might be a bit too male. Oh. Gabby. Hey, I have to wear a collared shirt to sneak into these things. I feel like an idiot. That's not my choice. Well,

you want me to go tits akimbo to the fucking prime minister. Someone else needs to be doing some sacrifices in here. I feel like I make sacrifices every day when I wake up and choose to come here. Yeah, but Gabi, is that more ridiculous than what actually happened, which was because we didn't know this

was happening beforehand and we were only smart enough to pre-pre-pre-pre-one one person to have an outfit to wear when you need multiple people to do a stun. That means that Zander and I were there. Zanda was in a T-shirt jean,

and Crocs. Can't believe they were suspicious for the start. Oh, I didn't know that. Are you telling if they let you walk through with him in Crocs? He should have been arrested anyway for wearing the Crocs.

Maybe that's why you were actually being told to leave. It wasn't because you weren't supposed to be in the press conference. It was because Xander was in Crocs. Yeah, I was also wearing a jumper that had flowers on it. Like a big hoodie.

And then I realized the point where I was like, oh yeah, my hoodie also doesn't work. Clayson because it was black at my way for crew was when SBS showed up and SBS even their crew were in. suits and I was like oh we would have just stuck out anyway yeah we would have walked up to meeting people who don't know us and they'd be like we're the fuck of these guys are we so basically

is this a pitch for us to buy suits for the office is that what this is i think we need to go to gowings gowings what is gowings exist you know when was the last time you bought a fucking suit charles i don't know i have people to buy them for but we look we it might sound like doom and gloom but we didn't give up um just because we couldn't make it into the press conference doesn't mean we exhausted all our options for getting to Scott Morrison. Right. And we got back to the office and we're immediately like, okay, let's go to his house. Let's go to his place of residence and try to deliver it to him there.

I mean, the police were pretty, there was a heavy police presence there as well. Just surprising. Just chilling? Yeah, yeah. So in front of the house, there was this, this was New South Wales police this time. So we got a taste of all the different policemen. But this person was waiting in a BMW in front of his house. And like as soon as I rang the doorbell, she jumps out and she's like,

flashing a badge. And that's her job? Yeah, sitting in a beamer and protecting the prime minister. I think it's because if you, as fucked as Scott Morrison, then you've got to expect people turning up to your house at all the hours. Also, I think when the chaser shows up to a press conference

and then gets turned away, it is probably safe to assume that we're then going to still try and get something out of our prop that we made. Yeah, yeah. You look, we glued a, um, Welding for Dummies, A4 page onto an existing Chaser book. That's a lot of work in this office. Yeah, yeah.

We're not going to let that go to waste. And you can catch that video on all the Chaser social media outlets, including TikTok. We're very popular on TikTok. The Chesa was going to prime ministerial press conferences 20 years ago. It's all just rinse and repeat. You guys were allowed in. Yeah, that's the difference. We wore fucking suits.

Not fucking crox, you fucking piece of shit. Our gear is from Road Microphone. We're part of the ACARS creator network. Catch you tomorrow afternoon. No, catch you in. Tomorrow. Catch you this afternoon. Catch you this afternoon.

Charles, you're on this podcast every time. You know, I think the AFB are going to catch us this afternoon.