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 pranks and, pranks, phone and/or calls:
“Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)
“The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)