Chris Taylor – Chasing His Dream

By Dan Hutton on September 30, 2015 in People

Where are you originally from?
I’m a Sydney boy. I grew up on the Northern Beaches in my early childhood, and then moved towards The Spit. I was a creature of the north growing up, but these days I reside in Paddington.

When did you move over to the east?
I think it would have been around 2000. My first proper job was in Melbourne. I got a cadetship with the ABC to be a serious journalist, and the deal was that if I wanted a job I had to move to Melbourne. I spent five years of my life working in the newsroom for the ABC, but I always had this itch to write comedy and some mates of mine back up in Sydney started this newspaper called ‘The Chaser’. I got in touch with them and asked, “Are you looking for any other writers?” I fully assumed the answer would be, “No, piss off.” But, to my delight, and what proved to be a great serendipitous career turning point for me, they said they were launching a new website to cover the Sydney Olympics. It was a special satirical piss-take called ‘Silly 2000’, and I’d have to move back to Sydney if I really wanted to join the team properly. I quit my job and moved back immediately.

Who was on The Chaser team at that stage?
The team was Charles Firth, Julian Morrow, Craig Reucassel and Dom Knight. They were the main editors of the newspaper.

What do you love about the Eastern Suburbs?
Having done a fair bit of travelling around the world, I’m always amazed just how unique it is to have beaches in the middle of the city. Very few great cities of the world have that. Rio has it, Cape Town also has it, but the beaches in those two cities come with the caveat that you probably lose all your clothes on the beach to petty thieves while you’re swimming.

What gets your goat about the Eastern Suburbs?
The despair of Oxford Street. What used to be one of the great arteries of the city is now a depressing wasteland. Every second shop towards the Woollahra end of Oxford Street is for lease and empty, and whether that’s because of greedy landlords or nervous retailers, I don’t know. I also feel, without getting too earnest or righteous about it, that the Eastern Suburbs – and Paddington in particular – still suffers from being a bit monocultural. It’s very white. Sydney is a fabulously multicultural city, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that when you walk around Woollahra or Paddington.

You mentioned briefly you did a cadetship; was that your first job?
I did an arts degree at Sydney Uni. I was then unemployed for two years like most arts graduates – like, bleakly unemployed. I was actually getting quite concerned, so I went back to uni to retrain. I went to UTS to do a graduate diploma in journalism and even after that I was still going for shitty jobs, like proofreading the Yellow Pages. Then just as I was about to give up, on a whim the annual ABC cadetships came up. I said, “I’ll apply, but there’s no way I’ll get it.” It’s regarded as the dream job for any journalism graduate and that was the one I ended up getting. I think because I was so convinced I wasn’t going to get it I was quite relaxed when I interviewed. I went in cracking jokes and maybe they saw something in that that other candidates didn’t have.

How did ‘The Chaser’ begin?
‘The Chaser’ began as a satirical newspaper, a bit like ‘The Onion’ in America or ‘Private Eye’ in England. It was just a hobby for us, like the way some people surf on the weekend or play golf. We wrote funny articles for this newspaper that came out fortnightly and which nobody read. It was very underground and it was bleeding money. It was an absolute loss making venture.

Who was funding it?
That’s a good question. A lot of parents and friends, and we held a lot of fundraisers. I had fundraising nights at the pub. Friends and family would come to these and put money in the hat, and that just kept it alive issue to issue. But it was being run at a loss. Andrew Denton picked up a copy of the newspaper while he was working at Triple M and saw in it an irreverence that he thought had been missing from Australian comedy. We were lucky that one of our very few readers just happened to be a reader of great influence. He got in touch with us and said, “I like what you’re doing, have you ever thought about TV?” We honestly said, “No, we all have day jobs and this is just our hobby.” Andrew said, “If ever you do have an idea for a television show I’d be very keen to produce it for you, and I’m willing to mentor you and show you the ropes of how TV works and how to write for TV.” The minute he said that we were all giddy with excitement, and at the prospect of maybe leaving our day jobs and working in television. We very quickly tried to think of television format ideas, and the one we came up with was to do a very short series covering the 2001 federal election. We wanted to parody tally room culture and the election night coverage. It was pretty bumpy, but the ABC saw just enough in it to let us go again with a longer show, which became ‘CNNNN’, and we did two seasons of that, which was a parody of cable news culture. I think it was important to us to mimic the sort of working model that we’d seen the D Generation use, of a tightknit writer/performer team. We didn’t have any outside writers, and even though we weren’t good performers we thought it was important – and Andrew Denton thought it was important – that we perform our own material. What a lot of people don’t know is that when we started CNNNN we did actually have serious discussions about getting actors in to play the anchors. We even auditioned a few really good actors, whose names I won’t mention, but the material just didn’t seem to sing as much when they did it as when we did it for some reason.

In your opinion, what’s the best work you guys have ever done?
Personally, I don’t have a favourite, but the one I occasionally do cite when people ask me was an idea of Craig’s called ‘The Trojan Horse’. I just loved the boldness of it, particularly the boldness of the scale of it. We actually built a Trojan horse, like a massive Trojan horse that would have done the people of Troy proud. The idea of it was to see what we have learnt from history. We took it to the Opera House, we took it to Channel Nine, and we took it to the Army Barracks on Oxford Street in Paddington. Every time it went in. We even took it to the actual Turkish Embassy. It made me laugh. The commitment of our art department to build this thing and the way that we pulled it off so perfectly, for me was more comically satisfying than the APEC stunt that everyone goes on about. APEC was just a great act of cheek and a great act of larrikinism. There’s not a lot of humour in the APEC piece. It’s more about a bunch of underdogs having a crack against the biggest security operation this country has ever mounted and winning. There was a David and Goliath satisfaction in the APEC one, but from a comedy point of view it’s actually not a very satisfying piece.

Was there any security briefing in the lead up to the APEC stunt?
Oh, yeah. I think some people think we were just a law unto ourselves running amok on the streets of Sydney doing what we wanted to do. Every single piece, and especially that one, was heavily planned and scrutinised. We had big editorial discussions and security discussions. All the planning in the world sometimes doesn’t prepare you for what might happen on the ground. I think we went into that shoot having canvassed every possible contingency, except the one that happened, which was that we’d get let in. All our planning was on the basis that we wouldn’t get let in. We thought we might get past the first gate, but we thought there was no way in the world we’d get into the red zone, which was the second full-on gate. And we did. That’s when we didn’t really have a script anymore. Julian Morrow, who was The Chaser guy on the ground calling the shots, said that if they wanted to they could have gone all the way to George Bush’s hotel or to the Opera House. He made the call to turnaround. It was a beautiful moment.

Has there ever been any Chaser infighting or do you all get on well?
We certainly get on. It amazes me that we’re still together in a sense that historically close knit ensembles like ours don’t last 16 years or whatever it is it’s been for us. We often make the analogy with rock bands. Personal tensions are ultimately their demise, rather than a lack of hunger to keep making music. I do remember there were some tremendous fights during CNNNN, not just within the group, but between the group and Andrew Denton. We had a lot of editorial disagreements. We’ve mellowed with age. Nowadays, there are very few raised voices in the writers’ room. There will be differences of opinion, but they are expressed in a very matter of fact, considerate way.

What did you make of the attention afforded to The Chaser by various media outlets, and by the wider public?
The attention from the public was mostly very flattering,because it was mostly people saying they enjoyed watching the show. But it is fair to say on the other side of that, that a lot of the negative coverage by ‘Today Tonight’ and some of the News Limited tabloids did start to hurt. They were attacking a comedy show disproportionately to whatever sin they believed we’d committed in the first place. A comedy show by its nature shouldn’t be taken seriously. After a while you just learn not to read everything, and I’m so glad that Twitter didn’t exist when ‘The Chaser’s War On Everything’ was on. God knows what the Twitter outrage mobs would have made of half of our material. We would have been lynched once a week.

At what age do you feel you have to stop behaving like a clown and start living a boring, dignified existence?
Probably about 18 is the right age. I just haven’t been very good at heeding that lesson. I do sometimes feel my career has just been one long attempt to prolong adolescence. Certainly working on the War On Everything there was an adolescent irreverence about it. By its nature it was a show that had no respect for rules. I think all of us might benefit from having a greater sense of mischief and a sense of play in our lives. It might appear on the surface that we’re irresponsible muckrakers, but what I think really drives our comedy is just a healthy disrespect for authority. We’re fairly convinced that in today’s society, more than ever before, we’re constantly being lied to, whether it’s by businesses or politicians or advertisers. All we’ve ever wanted to do is call out that bullshit, not earnestly, but do it with a smile and a cheeky irreverence. I don’t ever want to lose that.

Can you tell us a bit about ‘Plonk’ – the web series that you’re currently promoting. I believe you play yourself; is that correct?
I play a character called Chris Taylor who has my same backstory. I’m a member of ‘The Chaser’, but it departs from reality in that it turns out I’ve fallen on hard times and I’m being forced to do this shitty lifestyle show about wine. I’m really quite self absorbed and dismissive of others. So yes, I’m called Chris Taylor, but I hope people don’t think I’m really that vain or arrogant. I always say that I love the writing of this other Chris because it’s so different from me; it’s so the opposite of me. And they always go, “Oh yeah, yeah, if that’s what you want to believe.” I would like to believe that I don’t have those qualities in real life, but maybe the writers of the show did see elements of that in me and thought, “This is the perfect man for the role.”

Where did the idea for ‘Plonk’ stem from?
It’s the brainchild of Nathan Earl, who is an old mate of mine. Nathan created the show and he also worked on ‘The Chaser’s War On Everything’. We’d known each other for years, and we’d partied a lot together and discovered a mutual love of wine. He knew I was a bit of a wine drinker and we’d always talked about doing a show about wine. In the early discussions it was going to be more of a straight lifestyle show, which was the very thing we ended up taking the piss out of in the ultimate show, ‘Plonk’. Nathan realised that it’s pretty hard to do a straight lifestyle show about wine because unlike food, wine’s not very visual. It’s not very interesting to film and it all kind of looks the same. It’s either red or it’s white and there are not many things you can do with a glass. This is the first time I’ve ever gone into a project that I’ve had no script involvement in and just been an actor for hire, so from that point of view it was a really interesting challenge.

Would you classify the series as ‘branded content’, because essentially it’s just selling the wine regions of Australia, right?
Yeah, that’s very good question. I guess where Plonk differed was it existed as a fully developed TV series first. It wasn’t created specifically for a particular brand, it just used the brand funding model to get made. As a result we could pretty much run our own race creatively. With the second series of Plonk, the lion’s share of the funding came from Screen Australia, so it’s evolved even further away from the traditional branded content model this time around. But I was uncomfortable initially about doing anything branded content related. As someone who principally works for the ABC, I’m at times not even allowed to do any content or anything that’s seen to have a commercial stake in it. That did pose some complications in the original planning stages before season one, and there were some potential people going to put money into season one, like banks and so forth. I had to put my foot down and I said, “I just won’t do it, I’m not comfortable spruiking on behalf of a bank, nor will the ABC let me do that.” When the principal funding came from a tourism body (Destination NSW), which is still a government agency, I was okay with that. I sort of said, “All my life I’ve taken money from government agencies, why stop now.” That said, it is still branded content. You need to be transparent about it and say that someone has invested money in this program wanting something out of it, and what they want out of it is for people to go and explore our wine regions.

Is Australia producing as much good comedy content as it should be?
That’s a tricky one. ‘Should’ is an interesting word. The last couple of decades have been a difficult time for television comedy. It was a golden era in the ’80s when ‘Fast Forward’ was on, and there was ‘The Big Gig’, and the commercial stations made comedies. Even shows like ‘Hey Dad’, whatever you think of it, was a hit comedy show and it ran and ran on Channel Seven. The commercial stations now just don’t make comedy. As someone who is in the business of writing comedy and pitching comedy, there are very few places you can go in the marketplace to take a comedy idea. It’s pretty much just the ABC or SBS, and Foxtel to a degree, and that’s a problem. It didn’t always used to be like that.

Have you got any other big projects in the pipeline at the moment?
I’m developing a sitcom at the moment. I’m very excited about it because I’ve never written a narrative comedy. Most of the stuff I’ve written has been topical comedy or satire, whereas this is an attempt to develop characters and tell stories while still keeping jokes front and centre. Who knows if it will ever see the light of day, but I’m very grateful to have had the chance to have developed it, and have had a crack at writing a sitcom. Other than that, The Chaser team is back with season two of ‘Media Circus’ on ABC1. I don’t personally work on that show. I couldn’t even tell you what it is – presumably it involves cat videos.

Do you support any charities?
Yes. I’m quite an active ambassador for the White Ribbon Foundation. I do some organisational work and a lot of community meetings with schools and sports clubs to try and educate men about the evils of domestic violence. The other one I get behind is the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, which is a group devoted to improving literacy and numeracy in Indigenous kids in remote communities, which is more pertinent than ever.

Do you have any advice for aspiring content creators?
My main advice to content creators is to create content, which sounds obvious, but so many of them don’t. A lot of people say they want to be content creators, but they’re always waiting for a grant or waiting for a job. Good content will always get out. I grew up in an era where you were dependent on networks. If you had an idea, a network or a radio station or a film distributor was your only chance of your idea getting made and distributed. These days, everyone has a camera and everyone has access to YouTube or any other viewing platform that they want to post their content to. As we frequently see, good content can win the day through viral spreading.

In an ideal world, what does the future hold for Chris Taylor?
I don’t know. I can’t believe I’ve been as lucky as I have been over the last 15 years. If I was to be day dreamy and ambitious, I’d like to write a musical. Andrew Hansen has been talking for quite a few years about writing a musical. We did a silly little musical revue comedy, but it was very vaudeville. We both saw The Book of Mormon – the South Park musical – and we thought it was just perfect in every way. It was a really excellent piece of work. After watching that, we both said that one day it would be great to write something as good as that. The idea of moving into telling stories and writing narrative comedy definitely appeals as well.

Chris Taylor stars in Plonk Season Two, launching on YouTube October 19th and also available on streaming service Stan. Plonk tells the story of a hapless TV crew as they bumble, fumble and embarrass their way around Australia’s most iconic wine regions, trying to make a serious wine program.

YouTube.com/roadtoplonk