Opinion
Craig Reucassel: We did some tests to find out how many microplastics I have inside me
Peter FitzSimons
Columnist and authorCraig Reucassel is an Australian comedian and documentary maker. He hosts War On Waste, the third series of which begins this Tuesday at 8.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview. I spoke to him on Friday.
A documentary can’t just be one-and-a-half hours of gags, says Big Deal director Craig Reucassel.
Fitz: Craig, no one can look at your life and times, let alone the War On Waste, without asking about The Chaser, so let’s cut to … well, you know … the chase. How did The Chaser get started, 20 odd years ago?
CR: Charles Firth, Dom Knight and I had all been editors of Sydney Uni’s Honi Soit, and when Charles finished his degree he wanted to set up a satirical newspaper which would still maintain that undergraduate feel. Julian Morrow joined us as the fourth founding editor and the others joined as writers over the years.
Fitz: So the central dynamic was a bunch of blokes who refused to accept that their glory days at Sydney Uni were over, and so tried to keep going?
CR: (Laughs) I’ve never thought of it that way, but, yes, you could say that.
Fitz: And so where did the name Chaser come from?
Reucassel (third from left) with Charles Firth, Chris Taylor and Dominic Knight, four of the seven founding editors of The Chaser.Credit: Steven Siewert
CR: It started out as a newspaper that was meant to be a “chaser” on the week’s news. In terms of going to TV, we were initially approached, bizarrely enough, by Channel Nine. We actually went and had lunch in the boardroom, and with the arrogance of youth, we didn’t even get back to them with a pitch. Getting a lunch was enough of a bonus as students. But when Andrew Denton approached us – he was looking to get into producing stuff –we were very interested, and it all flowed from there.
Fitz: You, personally, had lots of bankable moments in those early years. Tell me about playing the “race card” in the 2001 federal election?
CR: Well, the Liberals had the ballroom at the Wentworth Hotel for their traditional victory party, so we booked this tiny room upstairs, and I dressed up as the “race card”. A whole mob of people were there to celebrate [John] Howard’s victory, which had been built on Tampa, 9/11 and children overboard. So I danced around, playing the “race card”, and yelling “we won, we won, we won!” “I told you if you played the race card, we’d win, and we did!” Initially, some people joined in, until they realised I may be taking the piss … and things started to get a bit ugly with some of them throwing beer on me. And at that moment the glorious hand of security grabbed me and removed me. This became the kind of Chaser model: that once you’d run out of things to say, security would remove you and give you an ending you didn’t have!
Fitz: So the essential schtick of The Chaser was to put yourselves in the face of massive authority and overbearing officialdom, and thumb your nose at them? Was that it?
CR: That got the headlines. But, the interesting thing about The Chaser is we were a team of people that had different sensibilities and different skills. Some didn’t care about politics at all. Some liked songs and sketches. Some of us were happy to get in people’s faces.
Fitz: And obviously, we have to talk about the APEC gathering of 2007, where, despite all these world leaders gathering in Sydney behind $160 million of security, The Chaser got Chas Licciardello dressed as Osama bin Laden, and managed to breach it by putting him in a limo with a Canadian flag on it, and running alongside it!
CR: It was extraordinary. We had quite a few stunts planned for that day because they were all planned on the basis that they were going to fail. We expected the limo to be stopped, and then Chas would get out and make it funny. But the amazing thing was the limo got through all the checkpoints, right in front of president Bush’s hotel!
War on Waste host Craig Reucassel.
Fitz: And Australia laughed – hard – for days. But was it difficult thereafter? That stunt was so brilliant, so breathtaking, that it was obvious to everybody that you had just hit the peak of Everest, with only the down slope ahead. And was it also part of the problem that the essence of The Chaser was to be in-your-face rebels, but you had become so successful, you were now mainstream yourselves?
CR: A little bit, ironically. We did do one more series after that. And people tended to think the War on Everything was pulled off air by the ABC, but we made the call ourselves because it was becoming harder to do that style of stuff, as we were so well-known. We’d be trying to do a stunt, and people would shout out, “Hey, The Chaser are here!” And so we moved to shows that relied a bit less heavily on stunts.
Fitz: And yet to the amazement of everybody, you’ve still managed to stave off doing honest work. You’ve had, in fact, nigh on 15 years of TV shows since The Chaser finished.
CR: Yeah, it’s extraordinary. Because I had no particular desire to go into television, and it was a very accidental career. But it’s been great.
Reucassel has created a number of documentaries with an environmental focus including Big Weather (and how to survive it).Credit: ABC
Fitz: OK, tell me about War on Waste. You’re just about to debut your third season.
CR: It started out as a show from the UK, and I was approached to do an Australian version. I wasn’t an expert and in my own life was much more focused on climate change. But that was part of the interesting thing: that the audience and I were able to go on a journey together, figuring out what the problem is, and what the answers are.
Fitz: But if the essence of The Chaser was taking the piss in the face of preening pomposity, what is the guts of the War on Waste?
CR: Right now, we dig things up, turn things into products and packaging, use them once or twice, or a few more times, then bury them. We’re burning through our resources, and we’re also feeding climate change. So we need a fundamental change.
Fitz: What exactly is the problem with being profligate with our resources? Can you spell it out?
CR: Well, to give an example, I know you’re a dag like me who just wears the same tatty T-shirt until it drops off you. But over the last few decades our approach to fashion has been to buy more and more items, and wear them less and less. And when over 60 per cent of our clothes are made of plastic, this contributes to climate change. And when our cotton uses enormous quantities of water, often in water-poor countries, this wastes our scarce resources. We have to buy less and wear it more.
Fitz: Is part of the problem that so much of the economy is built on the endless flogging of products that are then thrown away?
CR: I don’t think a “you should never buy anything” perspective is right. But it’s about giving our stuff value. Using it for a long time. Not being single-use or disposable.
Fitz: One of the most shocking things I have seen in the show is that up to 40 per cent of the bananas grown in Australia get thrown away simply because they don’t meet cosmetic standards.
CR: And that was really horrifying. We are facing absolute cost of living crisis and people struggling to get food on the table at the moment, food charities are being overrun by hungry people – but we are still throwing out perfectly good food, just because it has a couple of blemishes on the skin, and that’s just the beginning.
Fitz: Go on.
CR: Well, about a fifth of the food we buy gets thrown out, and most of it goes into landfill. That then breaks down, and creates methane which is a global warming nightmare.
Fitz: What can we expect in the next season? What are the highlights?
CR: We look at our modern dilemma of plastics. Why are we using so much? Why are we recycling so little, around 13 per cent, in Australia? And we look at why recycling schemes like RedCycle have fallen over.
Fitz: Why plastics particularly?
CR: Well beyond plastics being made from fossil fuels, there is also the health aspect …
Fitz: Hang on. Plastics are made from fossil fuels? I mean, of course I know that. Who doesn’t? But can you explain for our more obtuse readers? Most of us think of fossil fuels as, you know, things pulled from the ground that are burnt.
CR: Yeah, but oil and gas are also used as the main ingredients to make plastic. And at the same time we’re trying to remove these from our cars and our energy, we’re ramping up the use in plastics. A recent study found our plastic use in Australia created 16 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in a year. It’s one of the reasons I’m cautious about those pushing for us to burn our waste, or “waste to energy” as it is called, because there’s lots of plastic in it. And no one would be keen if it was pitched as a new energy-from-oil plant.
Fitz: OK. And back to the health aspect of plastic?
CR: The thing that was probably the most frightening for me in the show is we did some tests to find how many microplastics I have inside me, as a human living in the modern age. We worked with Dr Fred Leusch, and the answer was shocking, as it is inevitable, that as the plastic breaks down into microplastics, those parts can get inside us. And we don’t actually know yet what the overall effect is going to be on us. So we are all kind of human lab rats, right now – but it’s not good.
Fitz: I knew you were one of those plastic TV personalities, so I am not surprised your own reading was high. Speaking of which, haven’t you ever been tempted to cash in your organically grown credibility chips, go for the big bucks on the commercial stations?
CR: I have actually made television shows for both Channel Seven and Foxtel, but I love the kind of TV you can make on the ABC. You can answer big questions and you know no one will say “you’re going to annoy the advertisers”.
Fitz: I look forward to this season’s premiere. Tuesday evening, 8.30. Don’t be late. I’ll be the one in a tatty T-shirt, eating speckled bananas that are perfectly fine.
Joke of the Week
A Sydney man appears before St Peter at the pearly gates.
“Have you ever done anything of particular merit?” St Peter asks.
“Well, I can think of one thing,” the man offers. “Once, up at the Cross, I came upon a gang of Sydney underworld figures who were hassling a 20-year-old. I told them to leave her alone, but they wouldn’t listen. So I approached the largest and most threatening one and smacked him on the head, kicked his Harley over, ripped out his nose ring and threw it on the ground. I yelled, ‘Now back off biker boy, or you’ll answer to me!’ ”
St Peter was impressed. “When did this happen?”
“Just a couple of minutes ago.”
Quote of the Week
“You know when I say he’s brilliant, everyone says ‘oh, that’s terrible’. Well, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist: smart, brilliant, everything perfect.” – Former US president Donald Trump on Chinese President Xi Jinping.