Australian PM attacks jokes about Irwin and Diana

The Chaser team attracted complains over a song about how the flaws of Australian icons such as Steve Irwin and Sir Donald Bradman was always glossed over once they died death

The song, below, branded cricketer Bradman ‘a grumpy, Greedy total farce’ and crocodile hunter Irwin as ‘a cartoon kamikaze, who taunted crocs and tots so frequently’.

And singer Andrew Hansen, pictured, drew shocked laughs from the studio audience with his line: ‘Princess Di was just a slut for sex, when they looked in the car wreck, her dress was wet with Arab semen stains.’

Howard said: ‘I think it just totally distasteful and despicable. That kind of stuff about Don Bradman and Steve Irwin is contemptible. Why don't they stick to decent dirt-free humour that we can all enjoy?’

Opposition leader Kevin Rudd waded into the show, too, saying: ‘This is absolutely disgusting. You really need to lift your game, guys - this is just wrong.’

Broadcaster ABC said it had received only a handful of complaints from the show’s 1.5million viewers immediately after last night’s broadcast, but the figure rose following media reports and a campaign from a Melbourne radio host.

But an online poll on the website of the Herald-Sun, Australia’s biggest-selling tabloid, found that only one in four viewers found the song offensive.

Chris Taylor, who wrote the song, said: ‘It was intending to make a point about people who are flawed in life who are disproportionately hailed as saints in death.

‘You see it time and time again, people almost incorrectly eulogised and people very quickly forget what the person was like when they were alive.’

In the sketch, Hansen was stopped by his fellow Chaser members when he began a verse about Home and Away star Belinda Emmett, the wife of Australian chat show host Rove McManus, who died of breast cancer last year.

‘When we mentioned Belinda Emmett and stopped, that's our way of saying that's going too far,’ Taylor told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Published: 18 Oct 2007