Jeremy Corbyn, Tim Farron and Michael Gove just got pranked
- Text by Michael Segalov
Heydon Prowse, like quite a lot of people in the United Kingdom, is bored of this general election. One of the co-creators of the BAFTA award winning TV series The Revolution Will Be Televised, he’s no stranger to using comedy, stunts and pranks to make important political points. From Tony Blair to ISIS, David Cameron to Topshop, very few people have escaped the crosshairs.
But like most of us, Heydon and the team at Don’t Panic are feeling uninspired by the prospect of taking to the polls on 8 June. Theresa May’s Conservative campaign is refusing to offer up any policy whatsoever, her robotic repetition of “strong and stable” might be sticking to message but it’s dull at best.
Corbyn’s camp are firing off progressive commitments centre left and further leftwards, but if the polls are to be believed it’s looking almost impossible that he’ll make it into Number 10. The Liberal Democrats are also trying, but the only thing people want to talk about is how their leader Tim Farron probably thinks you’ll go to hell if you partake in gay sex.
“We wanted to prank call people as high up in the parties as possible to lighten the tone of this boring and depressing election,” he tells me. And that’s exactly what they did.
All three major parties got the prank-call treatment: Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Gove and Tim Farron have so far all got punk’d. “The Tories were hardest to get, we called up [Brexit Secretary] David Davis twice.” Heydon pretended to be Tom Hardy the first time, claiming he was about to be made the new James Bond.
“I said we wanted a Brexit Bond, no more Martinis only Boddingtons, not Aston Martins but Southern Rail.” It didn’t work, David Davis had never heard of A-list star, although he did later get duped into thinking he was having a chinwag with an Archbishop.
Jeremy Corbyn thought he was chatting to Stormzy, although
A dose of comic relief, the calls also appear to expose just how desperate the opposition parties are for support and attention, if anyone had bothered to check the phone numbers or with the agents of the impersonated celebrities it would have become pretty obvious rather quickly that these were a little bit suspect.
Either way their exploits are adding a bit of light relief to what’s a dull and bleak campaign, and Heydon promises there are plenty more pranks to come.
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