When you hire a presenter to join your radio station and bill his show on your own website by bragging at how previous over-the-top stunts have led to him being sacked from more or less every job he’s ever had, you probably ought to prepare yourself for the worst. And if you include a show in your schedules "where a lot of fucked up shit goes on", it’s best to assume that at some point you might become a target of some of that fucked up shit.
Advice that perhaps Andrew Jeffries, Programme Director at Birmingham’s
Kerrang! radio station, should have been given when the station hired one Tim Shaw. That way he might not have been so surprised when he returned to his house the other night to find Shaw and his producer Greg Pebble had broken into his house and staged a fake burgalry - all live on air.
Jeffries explains: "My wife and I had been to the cinema and came home to find we had been burgled, or so we thought. The window was smashed and there were obscenities on the walls. They had hidden the TV and other items to make it look as if we had been robbed. They emptied the cupboards and our clothes were strewn all over. Then they jumped out of a cupboard and told us it was a 'mock burglary' and they were broadcasting it all. I threw them out. The Asylum Show [Shaw and Pebble’s programme]
has featured pranks before but this was way over the line. There is a limit and this was way past it."
The presenter and producer were subsequently suspended. In an official statement the EMAP owned station said: "Kerrang! would like to confirm that management have suspended presenter Tim
Shaw and producer Greg Pebble indefinitely following an attempted on-air prank that went way far beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour”.
The interesting question is what the station would have said had it been a d-list celebrity whose house had been broken in to
- is it the stunt that crossed the “line”, or the choice of victim. Either way, presumably there is an on-the-edge radio station somewhere who will soon be bragging how their new presenter is so crazzee he was sacked from his last job after he broke into his bosses house. The PD of that station should be careful where he parks his car.