The Australian Broadcasting Commission has suspended the “comedy” show The Chaser`s War On Everything` because of the controversy where the problem made fun of children dying of cancer.
ABC managing director says the show will be off the air for the next two weeks to allow, “The Chaser a chance to regroup and review their material”.After the show aired on Wednesday evening, complaints flooded into the ABC. The broadcaster issued what we consider “an un-apology” the next day stating “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.”
Then yesterday, a lady by the name of Rochelle rang into Ray Hadley’s program on radio 2GB in Sydney and identified herself as the mother of the real sick child the skit was based on.
Then it got worse. Rochelle said that she was friends (up until the show aired) with one of the producers of the show, that they knew first-hand of the suffering that the family had been through in the last two years, but still based the segment on their daughter.
In one part, the dying girls asked to meet Zac Efron. “Why go to any trouble when they are going to die anyway,” was the response.
“They no longer deserve a platform in which they can inflict so much pain,” she said.
The bigger issue for The Chaser in 2009 is that the show simply is not funny anymore. A skit outside Buckingham Palace that aired on Wednesday failed dismally. The London policeman saw through it immediately and gave the crew a ticket. He then said into the camera “I hope you get a few laughs when this is on TV”. The producers of the segment failed to carry off the gag at all, yet it still went to air.
If any commercial broadcaster attempted to air a program as offensive as The Chaser it would be dropped immediately. Unfortunately, the government owned ABC has one set of rules but inflicts a whole different set of rules on the commercial broadcasters.
