The Chaser launches daily ‘5am’ podcast

The team behind satirical juggernaut The Chaser has announced its next move, heading into the podcast space with a daily news offering.

The podcast will come out at 5am each day, making it “two hours better” than Schwartz Media’s successful 7am offering.

Unlike 7am, however, The Chaser said its new The Chaser Report will offer “no quality analysis nor thorough research, and we guarantee Paul Bongiorno will never turn up to explain the latest goings on in Canberra”.

Instead, the podcast will contain sketches, stunts, songs and “the usual disgraceful topical humour from The Chaser”.

The Chaser Report will be hosted by original Chaser co-founders Charles Firth and Dom Knight each day, along with contributors such as Craig Reucassel, Zoe Norton Lodge, Sami Shah, Andrew Hansen, Nina Oyama, and Chris Taylor.

Firth told Radio Today that the podcast is absolutely “hate broadcasting”.

“It’s not going to be pleasant to listen to. It’s going to be terrible, terrible to listen to. We’ll be grumpy – especially Dom. Dom is the biggest grump in the world in the morning. So I think probably our strategy will end up being that we’ll end up staying up all night and you’ll listen to us at the end if a bender each morning.

“And because of course we won’t use any tricks like pre recording. We wouldn’t do that ever,” he added.

Firth said a huge part of the appeal of podcasting is the lack of gatekeepers and policies.

“Well I think the most exciting this is just he lack fo gatekeepers. Except for the website, which is also sort of a gatekeeper-less environment, every other medium, you are sort of answerable to far more sensible people who have far better crafts and far better legal training than you,” he said.

“And, with podcasts, it’s sort of the wild west…. [which makes it] something that we really, really wanted to do. So it’s extremely exciting. At a creative level, it’s extremely exciting.”

The show will also be offered on YouTube later in the year, as it will be filmed each day at The Chaser’s Global News Headquarters And Satire Sweatshop in Sydney.

“We figure we’ll get an audience of millions on YouTube, even though we’re just a bunch of uninformed people ranting,” Firth said. “We got the idea from Sky News.”

Knight said the video element made it akin to Joe Rogan’s podcast offering, “only without Joe Rogan, which is a real plus”.

The Chaser Report will be part of the Acast Creator Network.

The Chaser Report was previously a weekly half-hour comical current affairs podcast which was distributed via NOVA Entertainment.