The day radio wind-up merchant Steve Penk prank-called Tony Blair and made headlines around the world
At 8.20am a Downing Street receptionist was transferring Steve Penk's call through to Tony Blair. By 10pm that night the radio presenter and professional wind-up merchant was the lead story on every news channel.
On that occasion he'd got no further than the suspicious woman on the switchboard. Now working for Capital FM in London Steve wanted to try again, and this time he hoped to get right to the top. "She put us through immediately to Tony Blair's PA who at first wasn’t quite sure, saying it didn’t sound like him, but after a few more lines of dialogue, confirmed that she was convinced it was William Hague she was talking to and would go and fetch the Prime Minister. During this brief moment, I closed the microphone and told Jon, he was almost certainly about to talk to the Prime Minister and to be prepared, 30 seconds later a very familiar voice said 'Hello'...
"This wasn't some local builder or housewife, this was the British Prime Minister, one of the most powerful people in the world and I had just wound him up," said Steve. "I didn’t know him, I didn’t know if the man had a sense of humour, or if that morning something world threatening was going on, and here I was trivialising his day."
"Suddenly I had every single newspaper, radio station, TV station in the world wanting to talk to me," said Steve. "It was the craziest 24 hours of my professional life, it made Capital Radio even bigger, it took the heat off Tony Blair, who at the time was under intense political pressure, it made Jon Culshaw famous and gave him that big break he was looking for, and it made me into troublemaker number one and for a moment, the most famous radio presenter in the world.
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