Ofcom will wrap it in so much red tape that it will become almost impossible to get these things on the air.Veteran DJ Steve Penk has dubbed Key 103’s decision to change its name to Hits Radio ‘silly’. It might be the end of the wind-up phone call.
STEVE PENK PRANK TV
In the ‘pc’ world where we now live, where everybody is terrified of upsetting anybody and journalists, TV stations and radio stations are treading on eggshells, there will be consequences. Now all the blame is being put on these DJs. We didn’t have security measures in place. He took it for what it was – a piece of pantomime, nothing more.The hospital should have held up their hands and said: “We apologise.
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Prince Charles was on the 10pm news on Thursday night joking about it. I believe everybody should have treated it in the same way as the royal family. We live in a world where everybody looks to blame someone when something goes wrong.Įven before the tragic death of that nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, certain sections of the public got on their high horse and said that the wind-up call was terrible and should never have happened.
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Everything is now being dumped at the door of these two DJs. There would just be a bit of banter and that would be it. I don’t think they even thought they would get past the switchboard. They didn’t think there would be any consequences because it was just so ridiculous. They didn’t think it would get any further than that. They were thinking of the entertainment value of calling the switchboard and trying to get through with their silly English accents and somebody barking in the background pretending to be a royal corgi. Personally, I don’t think that call to King Edward VII Hospital was funny. (With the help of impressionist Jon Culshaw pretending to be William Hague, Penk prank-called the then prime minister in 1998). What they did was something similar to what I did with Tony Blair. I don’t believe those Australian DJs set out to offend. That said, in all my years doing it, nobody has ever refused to let a wind-up go on air.īut wind-up calls do polarise an audience: some love them, some find them embarrassing. If someone doesn’t see the joke, then you simply don’t broadcast it.
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Somebody had written in to say ‘Can you call my brother or mother about such and such a thing’. Mine were, for want of a better word, ‘cuddly’ wind-ups. And everybody loved hearing it because they knew how much he had loved it. In fact, he loved it so much that it was played at his funeral. This woman told me he absolutely loved that wind-up. He went bananas, but at the end of it he proved he had a great sense of humour.
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I had rung him pretending to be from the library, telling him he hadn’t returned a library book. I remember being at a party when a woman introduced herself and told me that I had wound up her dad a few years before. And the people at the centre of these little dramas do actually enjoy it. I’ve always described my wind-ups as mini-dramas. I’ve had people in such a state that if I’d been in the room with them instead of on the end of a phone, they would have strangled me with their bare hands. I’ve been doing wind-up calls for over 20 years, starting on Key 103 in Manchester, and I have done hundreds of them. That was the phrase which kept going through my mind in recent days as the story unfolded of how two Australian DJs had made a prank call to the hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was being treated, and how the nurse who took that call was later found dead.