Pranks and Hoax Phone Calls
A compilation of prank calls peaked at No.1 on the iTunes comedy chart on 27 July 2006. At the time of their first broadcast, they attracted some controversy: in The Sunday Times (15 April 1990) Paul Donovan opined that Lewis-Smith's hoaxes were "repugnant" and claimed that Lewis-Smith's company broke a "written undertaking that permission to broadcast would be obtained from all the people who had received the hoax calls" and that subsequently the BBC made illegal broadcasts in breach of their producers' guidelines. The Guardian's Lucy Mangan described some of the recordings as being "touched with genius". Writing about Lewis-Smith's hoax phone calls in The Times Higher Education, Sally Feldman observed that "He chooses his victims carefully, pricking the pompous and the powerful in the very best traditions of satire. His favourite target is the media, his pranks intended to expose their smugness, their laziness and their gullibility.".
Read more about this topic: Victor Lewis-Smith
Famous quotes containing the words phone calls, pranks and, pranks, phone and/or calls:
“You may be used to a day that includes answering eleven phone calls, attending two meetings, and writing three reports; when you are at home with an infant you will feel you have accomplished quite a lot if you have a shower and a sit-down meal in the same day.”
—Anne C. Weisberg (20th century)
“Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)