radionotes podcast episodes

Charles Firth

by | Aug 6, 2023 | episodes | 0 comments

Charles Firth

Charles Firth is a founding member of The Chaser, author of American Hoax and Fractured Fairytales to name a few credits of their career.

As well can be heard on The Shot podcast hosted by Jo Dyer with Dave Milner and Grace Tame and is the co-host of The Chaser Report with Dom Knight.

While on tour with Wankernomics, Solutionising The Corporate World with The Shovel’s James Schloeffel at the Adelaide Fringe Charles spoke to radionotes‘ John Murch about music and life.

Hear their chat here…

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IMAGE CREDIT: Jason Doyle (Studio Commercial)

The Anti-Experts presents The War on 2023 Annual Comedy Gala from late-November through to early-December

SHOW NOTES: Charles Firth

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Feature Guest: Charles Firth

The War on 2023 – Annual Comedy Gala

Next Feature Guest: Lisa Caruso reflects on Stretching (latest EP)


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TRANSCRIPT

First version provided by REV a human team member – check to audio before quoting wider

John Murch:
Welcome to radionotes.

Charles Firth:
Hello, John.

John Murch:
Adelaide, firstly, and you had a chat with our Professor Longsword from Adelaide so you’ve had the Adelaide experience.

Charles Firth:
I certainly have.

John Murch:
You’ve been probed, so to speak, regarding the show and the legalities of that but what is your impression of Adelaide in terms of this time of the year? We’re talking about Adelaide Fringe Festival, WOMAD, sometimes we throw in a car race.

Charles Firth:
Yeah. Well, it is the best festival in Australia by far. In fact, I think it’s the best single event of any event in Australia by far. The Fringe is so beautiful and it has such a geography to it and I feel like there’s… I come from Sydney and there’s no real geography to our festivals. We have every year the Sydney Festival but there’s no central space in which you gather each night and… We have Vivid which probably does have more geography to it but you’re freezing and it’s cold and there’s a hundred billion people and everything.
And the Melbourne Comedy Festival used to have a real geography to it, it had a centre of gravity around the Melbourne Town Hall and you had to go and buy physical tickets. So if you wanted to know what was on, there was no such thing as the web. You would go up to the chalkboard and see what wasn’t sold out and go and get your tickets. That geography has completely eroded in the last few years and it’s a real pity and that’s why the fact that Adelaide puts on these amazingly beautiful spots, both The Garden and Gluttony, but especially Gluttony. It’s got a lake in the middle. There’s no better experience in Australia.

John Murch:
And on top of that, as you appreciate, with a Fringe Festival, as some of those venues, if we just take you away from the main hubs, and there are more and more hubs coming up, down alleyways, for example, there’s like a wool shed which was near Frome Street. I walk down there. It’s like this old building which, of course, is part of that renew campaign. There were six of us in the audience for someone called Hannah Gatsby and Sue-Anne Post was next to me.

Charles Firth:
Oh, wow.

John Murch:
Let’s talk music with you. You grew up in a household listening to left wing albums. This was a description you gave to the Five of My Life with Nigel Marsh. Can you talk us through how that turned you into the political animal you may have become?

Charles Firth:
Well, it certainly gave me a fondness for that and probably a romanticised fondness for the protest movements of the ’60s and ’70s. So we’re talking Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, obviously. But also, the ’70s, like Judy Small. Do you remember Judy Small?

John Murch:
Mm-hmm.

Charles Firth:
My parents were heavily involved in the peace movement and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s. And so, you’d go along to these large festivals that were also protest rallies and peace marches and things like. That where you’d go along to the domain, there’d be 100,000 people marching for peace on Palm Sunday and things like that. It was a lot of integration with local churches and things like that. I mean, you don’t think of local churches as being particularly left wing nowadays. But back then, there were a lot of very progressive churches that were integrally involved in that movement.
At those marches, you’d all sit down on the domain and then there’d be hours of music that would play and people like Midnight Oil would come along and play at marches and things like that. Just some of the most joyous, happy moments happen in my living room where we’d get out Pete Seeger and play. Especially, actually, at university, everyone would come over and we’d put on some Pete Seeger albums and sing along to them and imagine that we were in the 1960s still.

John Murch:
I want to reference back to Nigel Marsh’s conversation. It’ll be in the show notes for those who would like to listen in full, to the other four items you brought to that episode that you had with Nigel. But you mentioned that it was the song, you had to bring a song, and it was called We Are Women, The Equal of Men written by two men thanks to the ACTU.

Charles Firth:
Yeah. I think it was about 1977 or 197-

John Murch:
You said ’79.

Charles Firth:
’79. Yeah.

John Murch:
And I’m backing you on that. Part of your mum’s collection as well, that particular album.

Charles Firth:
Written by Bob Young and-

John Murch:
Arthur Sherman maybe?

Charles Firth:
Yes, Arthur Sherman. And remarkable… I mean, the anthem of second wave feminism really.
(Singing).
And then, it goes into a marching band. It is a ridiculous song and I love how the men have written it so that, “We’ll do it with you.” And I love the fact that at that point, they hadn’t been to the moon but there’s a whole verse devoted to, “We will rocket to the moon. That’s our plan.” So it’s just… I once ran for president or something at Sydney University Union or the SRC or something and I needed to get votes and everything, so I put myself out there a bit.
And one of the things I did was I decided to enter, there was a talent competition at the bar at lunchtime and I decided it would be a good idea to put that song on which I thought was hilarious and come out with a friend of mine and we’d do a dance to it and send it up. But it got lost in translation a bit, and essentially, all the women’s group and feminist groups turned vehemently against my campaign immediately and I lost the election.

John Murch:
Speaking about women, and this is the smartness of Charles who joins us today, you actually wooed your wife with a dictionary.

Charles Firth:
The Doubter’s Companion was a book written by John Ralston Saul back in what? The mid-1990s or something. He was very popular back then. He’s a Canadian philosopher and I think for a while he was the first lady of Canada. He was the husband of the Governor General. Wrote this dictionary called The Doubter’s Companion which is a Vedarian take on all the key concepts in the world and I used to love this. It was so witty. It was the wittiest book. So he defined things like the Big Mac is the communion wafer of consumption because actually, it is completely insubstantial. It itself is just a symbol. But as you consume it, it transmogrifies into everything that we love about capitalism. You’re buying a concept, you’re not really buying food in the same way that the wafer of bread is Christ’s body. And so, it was just a very wise thing. And yeah, and so I used to spend hours reading out the witty word definitions and trying to impress my now wife.

John Murch:
What is the song that reminds you of your lovely wife?

Charles Firth:
Well, we’ve got a song, For The Longest Time by Billy Joel. This now amazing composer who works with Baz Luhrman, goes to the Oscars, and is part of that team that’s done Great Gatsby and the latest one with Elvis, I can’t remember the one before. He composed for us a wedding march and at one point… And we said to him, “Oh, we really like that Billy Joel song.” And so, halfway through… So it’s a classical piece of music. It’s a 3-minute wedding march. It’s the most amazing piece of art but halfway through, the trumpets break into a rendition of For The Longest Time and it’s just, yeah, it’s very beautiful.
And I think that’s just because we used to put it on as an LP when I was at uni and for some of the time, I was living in my mum’s home. And so, we had all the old LPs. So most of the time when I was at uni, we would listen from all the old LPs. And you had to get up every 20 minutes but it meant that you had to pay attention to the music all night. And towards the end of the night, I’d inevitably put on that song and Amanda would fall into my arms.

John Murch:
Do mention there regarding this record collection so I should go very RocKwiz Julia Zemiro on your… And apologies if you end up on RocKwiz. What was the first album you bought with your own money?

Charles Firth:
Wow. I mean, because I used to pirate-

John Murch:
You are the Napster era.

Charles Firth:
Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. I was tape like-

John Murch:
Okay. Mixtapes. Yep.

Charles Firth:
Because of the tapes. The first album I wanted to buy with my money, it was probably a compilation. It was probably something like Choose 1985. There was a record store a few kilometres at the big shopping centre near where I lived and we used to just… Was it called Angel Records? I think it was called Angel Records. And you just go and hang out there all weekend listening to music and you’d never… No, actually it would’ve been the single. In fact, I know what it was. So it was actually a little bit later than Choose ’85. I think my parents must’ve bought me Choose ’85. Star Trekkin’ Across the Universe single-

John Murch:
By The Firm-

Charles Firth:
Which would’ve been 1987. Was it by The Firm? Yeah.

John Murch:
I believe so. Yeah. That was a parody, of course, of the Star Trek theme. Was parody already in your life at that point that you got that single, Star Trekkin’?

Charles Firth:
That year, which was Year 5 for me at school, was a year where I turned from being a fairly serious person into somebody who relied far too much on making people laugh and laughing myself as my way of coping with the world. So yes, that was the moment where I fell in love with comedy.

John Murch:
There’s other podcasts that can delve into how comedy then developed for you but I’m interested who those first comedians were.

Charles Firth:
They were school friends. So Sean O’Neill who’s a guy in my class… Actually, yeah, he was in my class. He used to bring in Spike Milligan like books and things like that and we would just sit at lunch and just laugh and laugh. If you’re talking comedic influences, Peter Bowers wrote a book, I think in 1987, called The Little Person’s Guide to Long Words. So his promise was all the words except for one in this book are real words and they were just the most ridiculous words you’ve ever heard and this was before the internet so it was like-

John Murch:
And this is before your obsession with dictionaries.

Charles Firth:
Yeah. That’s right. Exactly. I must have always had a bit –

John Murch:
Yeah.

Charles Firth:
They were just amazing words and the whole challenge would be you’d read them at lunch and then the challenge would be to slip them in. “Oh man, are you feeling a bit zaychoun?” We must have been such terrible wankers. The point was, in the book he made, was you’ve got to go away and work out which one’s the wrong one. So it means that you don’t use the words lightly. Actually, it gave you a reason, really, a pretext to go to the library.

John Murch:
Did Dom Knight release an Australian dictionary encyclopaedia?

Charles Firth:
Yes. He did and it sold very well. Yes. It was a dictionary of Australian words.

John Murch:
Yeah. Was it a sexy dictionary? Could someone get quite amorous with this dictionary?

Charles Firth:
No. It was far more mainstream than that.

John Murch:
No. Sorry, Dom. Getting back to those younger years, did you ever pick up an instrument yourself?

Charles Firth:
So I played the piano and the violin until into primary school and the flute. When I went to high school, I don’t know, I should have just kept playing, especially the flute. I was actually not bad at the flute but I just dropped them all. I just used that as a pretext to drop them all. What it gave me was good pitch, so I then just started singing and I love singing. I did choir all the way through and I did chamber choir as well which was a smaller choir but for classical music in school and it was so wonderful because I remember the Year 12 person who looks at the marks and makes sure that you’re going all right went, “Charles, don’t you think you should just drop some of your choir commitments?” because I was just singing at school.
And it was like, “No, I think that’s why I come to school. I’d prefer to do well in that.” But then, as soon as you leave school literally took me about 20 years before I then went back and… Sydney Philharmonica every year do a choir. You can join a mass choir and you do several rehearsals and then they put it on and we put it on the opera house. And that one was, I think it was Brahms’ Requiem the year that I did it a couple of years ago and that is a fantastic piece of music and you get to sing with hundreds of other enthusiasts.

John Murch:
We had a conversation with Jessica Donoghue who’s Roy O’Donoghue’s daughter who’s an opera singer. And what do you think opera and classical music generally needs to do moving forward? How can it modernise from someone who has performed some of it?

Charles Firth:
But I think it is, I actually think it’s really exciting because there’s such a link. This is based on… I have no knowledge of… So I’m not an expert on modern classical music at all. But what I have noticed is the really great popular modern classical have a crossover between film and the visual arts and music and they’re getting their sounds into soundscapes and out to people through film. And so, people get familiar with it. And then, you turn around and suddenly you’re listening to a Philip Glass piece and you’re going, “Oh god. I really like this. This is really pumping,” and you realise, “Oh no, that was in an episode of blah blah.” Or actually, there was one the other day, Max Richter, who I love, who does some really witty things with classical music, he released Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. He updated it and he actually changed the rhythms of that piece. He did what CPE Bach did to J.S. Bach. Do you know much about-

John Murch:
Walk us through this. Because at the moment, I’m imagining the Max Richter has done a Melbourne version of Four Seasons called Whatever Season It Is, It’s Not The One You Want.

Charles Firth:
It’s a really great. I took my sons to see it at the Opera House last year and some of the movements sound very familiar. It starts out where you’re going, “Oh yeah, this sounds a bit like the Four Seasons.” And then suddenly, it’s in 3/4 or something rather than 4/4 and suddenly, there’s a syncopation. It gives a whole new energy to it and really, it’s similar soundscape to Philip Glass or something like that.
But the reason why I mentioned Bach is… J.S. Bach, he’s the famous Bach. When he was writing his music, he actually was pretty daggy and it was very disposable music. Famously, 40 years later, a lot of his pieces were recovered because some music teacher found the kids in his class were wrapping their lunches in old music thing and it was all just J.S. Bach music that… Because he’d just rock up on a Sunday and do some jazz riffs and write it down but it’d be never thought of again. But what one of his sons did, he had about a hundred billion sons and he gave… His least talented son ended up inheriting all the wealth and all the support of his dad, institutional support, and wrote very similar sounding, quite boring stuff.
But there was this other guy, other son, CPE Bach, who I think actually fell out with his dad who modernised it and made it like a Philip Glass or Max Richter style. And you listen to it and you go, “That is modern classical music.” It’s largely forgotten as well. It’s not like we go, “Oh yeah, Bach, CPE, he’s my favourite.”
Anyway, getting back to Max Richter, I was watching an episode of The Last of Us, that famous Episode 3, beautiful episode. And at the end, there’s a fairly sad but uplifting end and suddenly, you see this Max Richter riff comes in and it’s like, “We heard that at the Opera House,” and it’s like, “Oh, that’s what the modern classical composers are doing is they’re actually getting into our consciousness very effectively.” And you might not know, but you probably are a fan of modern classical music in a way that wasn’t really true 20 or 30 years ago.

John Murch:
Speaking about going out and seeing music, live music, what’s been one of those memorable live music experiences?

Charles Firth:
Well, we decided… Because I went and lived in the US for a couple of years in my late 20s and we decided to go and see all the classics that we could… Make sure you see Elton John and Billy Joel and Paul McCartney and all those sorts of things and they are all rocking great stars. Probably, the best concert I’ve ever been to was, and I know this is weird because I wouldn’t normally pick it, but Paul McCartney is very charismatic on stage, for some reason.
So in terms of impressive people, it’s amazing. But there’s been… To be honest, the most joyous concerts I’ve been to have been pub gigs where your friends are playing like Andrew Hansen and actually, Dom was occasionally in that band. No, it was Andrew Hansen, Tom Gleeson, James Fletcher, and Cameron Bruce who now tours with Paul Kelly. But they had a band for several years called the Fantastic Leslie in the late 1990s in the Sydney pub scene. They were just fantastic nights because it would be hundreds and hundreds of fans turning up. You get out on the dance floor. I mean, they were playing the places that are now just pokey places. They’re the ones that I remember most fondly because they’re your friends and they’re making great music.

John Murch:
I was reminded that The Chaser, the TV show which we were a founding member thereof, had both Quan of Regurgitator and Tim Rogers of You Am I basically smashing the proverbial out of a couple of guitars for points.

Charles Firth:
Yes. Yeah. It was good.

John Murch:
Rock and roll.

Charles Firth:
Yeah. It was rock and roll. It was.

John Murch:
We’re currently in conversation with Charles Firth, a founding member of The Chaser currently touring with Wankernomics with one of the members of The Shovel and also, check out The Shot podcast as well with Jo Dyer, Grace Tame, and a number of great talented people as well. You’re listening to radionotes. Let’s talk about satire and music. Is there a working relationship between the two? You did jump the gun a little for me and mention Andrew Hansen. Can you talk to us about satire and music and how particularly, I guess, with The Chaser and what you’re producing in that umbrella, how the two relate?

Charles Firth:
They work really well together and I think it’s because satire is not a very emotional form of art. It’s actually. It triggers your frontal cortex and your rational side and your cognitive brain. But mixing it with something that’s more emotional like a rocking great tune, actually gives you a whole of mind experience that actually works much better.
Andrew and I wrote several songs in the tune. Although, actually, one of the ones that actually went quite well, I helped write the tune for as well but we’d combine forces on the lyrics and that often spurred out quite fast. When you’re writing songs, there is an intuitiveness to… They’ve got to actually match with the emotional rhythms of the tune and stuff like that so it’s an interesting process to write but they’re not… You can edit songs a bit, like the lyrics of songs once you’ve written them. But actually, in my experience, they tend to fall out fairly fully formed. That’s been my experience whenever I’ve written songs with people.

John Murch:
Ever been a drive… Because there is the Radio Chaser stuff that has a bit of musical element to it and Andrew Hansen released his songs over the time but has there ever been a tour de force to do more music?

Charles Firth:
Well, I appointed Gabbi Bolt who’s a young musical comedian and incredibly talented as a Chaser intern a couple of years ago.

John Murch:
Sellout shows at the Adelaide Fringe.

Charles Firth:
Yes, exactly.

John Murch:
Five star reviews.

Charles Firth:
Odd Sock was the name of her show this year. So she would write songs for us and I’d send her a first draught of a song just to try and many ways just to provoke a response and she’d always come back with something 10 times better and more in her voice and stuff like that. I would say that all the best satirical songs though, they are rare. They are rare. Gabbi can write a hundred songs and then out of those, there’ll be six… And she does, she writes a hundred songs and then there are six that actually just absolutely become… You just go, “That’s still going to be sung in 20 years time.”

John Murch:
Andrew Hansen did musical stuff in the past and now is solo. Is Gabbi the new Chaser music go-to person?

Charles Firth:
Gabbi’s got her own trajectory, I think. Look, we’ve invited her back tour with us at the end of this year with The War on 2023 tour. But she’s got an agent now as her agent says, we’ll have to wait until after March. So watch this space. I mean, her career’s going like that. It’s the story of my life, which is fall in love with these wonderful, talented young comedians, and then watch them skyrocket past me.

John Murch:
We don’t have to say who but same with radio producers, I know how you feel.

Charles Firth:
Yes, I know. You wouldn’t want it any other way. I think that’s the whole point is you want people to follow their own path and I’m not sure… I mean, Gabbi is such a unique being. I think she’s her own voice, to be honest. You don’t want it to be The Chasers’ Gabbi Bolt. You want it to be… I mean, I’m so glad that she was part of the team for a while but it’s like you just go, “Yeah. Let her be whatever she wants to be.”

John Murch:
The core of that question about music in the future for The Chaser and it sounds like there always has been, every now and again, a home for it when the narrative suits.

Charles Firth:
Yes, yes.

John Murch:
So you’re not actively seeking to have a musical outfit who’s part of The Chaser.

Charles Firth:
No, no. And I think that’s right. I think all the best integrations of song into our screen stuff has been when… I’ll just hark back to CNNNN. We had this episode which actually, I think, won an AFI or something, which was called the Tilt Australia campaign and the whole idea was there was a drought on in Australia. And at that time, a whole lot of right wing radio shock jocks and rich capitalists had got together and they’d announced some fund to solve Australia’s drought by, I don’t know, putting on an ad campaign or something like that.
And so, we took that idea and we created The Tilt Australia campaign which was to literally solve Australia’s drought by tilting Australia so that the water that was in the north would run south. And Andrew and I wrote the… Well, he wrote the song, I wrote the lyrics with him which was (singing). And we did it as a whole campaign anthem and we got celebrities and everything to all tilt to the music and it was just a wonderful parody of terribly badly thought out marketing comments. I think that’s the best integration is when the music is serving the broader satirical purpose.

John Murch:
We’ve already mentioned Star Trekkin’ which is a parody. But generally, what’s your view on parody and its place?

Charles Firth:
Well, we-

John Murch:
Particularly musically speaking.

Charles Firth:
Who is the best musician in the world with Al Yankovic? The nicest guy, never had a scandal, he’s the most enduring. It’s just hit after hit after hit, he’s just… Well, that answers your question and he is perfect. He’s perfect. My kids love him. My kids love the same songs that I loved of his 20, 30 years ago.

John Murch:
With all the experience you have in and around television and as one of the founding members of The Chaser who know whether or not it can and can’t work, could Australia have a late night variety show that could include live musical acts again?

Charles Firth:
TV doesn’t really exist anymore in that format so maybe not a free to air TV broadcast show. I can imagine a version of that being done on a YouTube live or something. I can imagine there is possible to think of forms that would mimic that sort of thing. But yeah, it’s over for free to air and it’s over for everyone watching broadcast television at the same time. That’s why I say I think it would have to be something where the synchronisation of experience which I think is key to those sorts of formats because about the frisson of being live and therefore, slightly dangerous.
I think it would have to happen in concert somewhere online, I think. Even if a broadcast… I mean, thinking about it, I think as TV has abated, the audience has got older, and so actually, programmers are far more conservative and all the radical stuff is moving behind paywalls onto the streaming services and things like that. But I can imagine a time when some bright spark possibly at the ABC or maybe SBS, realises that there’s a land grab to be had or an audience grab to be had in being a bit dangerous again-

John Murch:
Just turning on the switch and walking in and-

Charles Firth:
Yeah. Yeah. And studio director for the first 10 years of Q+A, his name’s Mark Fitzgerald. He was The Chaser’s studio director as well back in the day. But he always maintained that Q+A would be much better if it also had a live band, right? Because Mark did the scream on rage. He’s that guy, right? He loves-

John Murch:
He’s been around.

Charles Firth:
Yeah. He’s been around. And he’s right because even just the presence of a band in a room, even if you only have the band actually playing a whole song right at the end of the show, changes the whole nature, the feeling of the space-

John Murch:
And that is what I think Fran Kelly got right with Frankly is because there was a house band. It had a band so it was that engagement.

Charles Firth:
Yes. It would not surprise me if Mark Fitzgerald did not have a conversation with somebody and-

John Murch:
A little whisper.

Charles Firth:
A little whisper about the need for a band. Mind you, I think I’m sure Fran could have come up with that as well.

John Murch:
I do want to ask you because as part of The War On series, you did tour with Mark Humphries who I want to talk to about Sondheim and musicals.

Charles Firth:
He won Mastermind with that special.

John Murch:
There’s any musical yarns between you and Mark Humphries without speaking out of school that you’d like to share with us?

Charles Firth:
Well, he took me to the premier of Urinetown the other day. He’s got a Twitter account called Mark’s Musicals.

John Murch:
Yes.

Charles Firth:
There’s the Mark Humphries that you see on 7:30 who does the satirical sketches and then there’s Mark, the musical guy. The thing is red carpet premiere and he’s chatting to everyone and, “Who was that?” “Oh, that’s the director of the show.” “Who’s that?” “Oh, that’s the producer,” like he knows everyone. It’s just amazing. We go to this production… Because I love Urinetown. Have you ever seen Urinetown?

John Murch:
I think I may have but-

Charles Firth:
Yeah. Well, it started on Off-Broadway and then went up to Broadway. I saw the Broadway production of it, the Tony winning Broadway production of it, and it was in… The Sydney show was 15 years later, a bit of a re-interpretation.

John Murch:
Is there a particular musical that really grabs you and speaks to you?

Charles Firth:
Urinetown definitely. I mean, love all the… I mean, there were so many good musical. I love them all, especially the funny ones. So Avenue Q would be in my top five. I mean, I’m a sucker because I was always in the musicals at school. First one was Princess Ida which is a bit of a dud of the Gilbert and Sullivan but oh, I enjoyed it. And then, we did Pirates of Penzance which was great. And then, there was some drug scandal and the teacher was sacked so we didn’t do Gilbert and Sullivan after that. We did South Pacific after that actually, just thinking about it. That’s a great musical… I mean, that’s a silly musical but I’ve spent many a drunken night singing tunes from South Pacific with Mark Humphries in karaoke back alleys.

John Murch:
Charles Firth, what’s your go-to karaoke song?

Charles Firth:
I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston. When I first did karaoke in front of my wife, she wasn’t my wife. We were barely going out. I put on I Will Always Love You and sang it to her thinking it was romantic and this was in front of all her university friends and she got so angry and humiliated and stormed out. And I thought, “It was very touching,” because (singing), because you get to do falsetto. It’s really nice. But you’ve got to… I mean, any old classic 1980s ballad is going to be fantastic karaoke.

John Murch:
What can people expect at a War on 2023 type tour?

Charles Firth:
Well, actually, we’re thinking of changing the name this year. It’s actually the funniest headlines of the year plus some sketches by Gabbi and Mark and James and me. But essentially, that was the year that was is the concept behind it and it’s a really good show. Because actually, what it does is it distils all The Chaser headlines and all The Shovel headlines from the year into a tight 40 or 50 minutes. And then, bolsters it all with… Last year, we had a whole lot of songs from Gabbi sprinkled throughout the show. It was just a rollicking great show so-

John Murch:
Charles Firth, thanks very much for doing radionotes.

Charles Firth:
Thanks, John.

AI generated summary supplied by Rev: In this interview, Charles Firth, a founding member of The Chaser comedy group, discusses his experiences with music and satire. Firth praises the Adelaide Fringe Festival and its unique geography, contrasting it with other festivals in Sydney and Melbourne. He also reflects on his upbringing in a household that listened to left-wing albums, which influenced his interest in protest movements and peace marches. Firth discusses the power of music in satire, highlighting the work of “Weird Al” Yankovic and the integration of music in The Chaser’s TV show. He also mentions his collaboration with musical comedian Gabbi Bolt and the potential for a late-night variety show with live musical acts. Firth shares his love for musicals, particularly Urinetown and Avenue Q, and reveals that his go-to karaoke song is “I Will Alwavs Love You” by Whitney Houston. He concludes by discussing The Chaser’s upcoming tour, which will feature the funniest headlines of the year and sketches by the group.

 

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