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. 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. 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.