A tearful woman who went by the name of Rochelle rang into Ray Hadley`s radio program today to say that she is the mother of the real child with cancer who was made fun of on The Chaser TV show this week.
Rochelle said that the child actors in the show were the children of the show’s producer and until this week they were also family friends.“They no longer deserve to have a platform in which they can inflict so much pain especially to a community of people who are dealing with the hardest thing a parent can ever deal with,” Rochelle told Hadley on Sydney radio station 2GB.
On the show on Wednesday night, one of the sketches from the show featured dying children making a “real” wish for ‘The Make A Realistic Wish Foundation’. The Chasers Chris Taylor ended the sketch saying “Why bother? They’re just going to die anyway.”
“I watched the skit and felt sick to the stomach,” Rochelle said.
“The mother of the twins is my sister-in-laws best friend,” she said. “I cannot express the anguish that not only the skit itself has brought to my family but also the fact that we know them and have had dinner with them and they have known of our plight over the last two years”.
The ABC issued a non-apology after the out-roar following the airing. “If an unintended consequence of this was to attack a group in the community who nobody feels deserves to be the subject of satirical content, then we apologise for that today, but The Chaser will go on,” the ABC statement read.
“I think that mother who I know well will be dying at the moment over what has been happening. So she should be,” Rochelle said. “That they are not being pulled from the air is a disgrace.”
The sketch was pulled from the repeat of the show on Thursday night but ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has confirmed that the show will return to the air next week as scheduled. Plans are now underway from various media organisations to completely blackban the ABC next Wednesday.
