By Lauren MacGillivray
Exposing the screw-ups of politicians and other well-known Canadians is the blow Pranks aims to deliver.
Alan Martin, 30 and associate editor of FRANK Magazine, and managing editor Steve Collins, 29, have launched their first book of bludgeon, featuring the edited texts of 27 prank phone calls.
“People think pranks are like Bart Simpson’s, that they’re just silly jokes, but another part of it is they can be very informative,” says Martin.
The pranks torpedoed victims over six years, and were previously published in FRANK. The hit man for most of the calls was Glen McGregor, a former editor to FRANK, who’s now at the Ottawa Citizen.
Martin and Collins, who’ve since taken over prank duty, were asked to pitch a book idea to ECW Press, and Pranks was born — opening up some old wounds.
The NDP no doubt feels acid in its healing sore, after a prank left it with searing embarrassment, and a lawsuit.
Posing as himself, Martin called NDP finance critic Lorne Nystrom at the height of the Human Resource Development Canada job grant scandal last year. He claimed he’d obtained Access to Information documents revealing more mismanaged funds.
On Feb. 23, Martin and Collins concocted a story that Hollinger, Canada’s leading newspaper company, had received $40,000 from HRDC job funds. The money was supposedly to send one of its vice-presidents to England to take a course in heraldry, the art of painting armorial bearings, at the “Cleese Institute in London.”
“We wanted to push the frenzy and we thought people would probably believe it,” explains Collins.
Nystrom failed to realize the call was a joke and that the Cleese Institute doesn’t exist.
Believing Martin, Nystrom exclaimed: “This is absolutely scandalous and people deserve a very independent inquiry as to what the hell’s going on.”
The bait was swallowed, and the NDP issued a news release declaring the Liberals had handed Hollinger $40,000 for heraldry lessons.
Hollinger is now suing the NDP for libel.
“I regret that . . . well, it was funny. But I regret the fact that we might have destroyed socialism in Canada,” says Martin. “If (Conrad) Black wins, it could bankrupt the NDP. It shows you how BS our libel laws are.”
No matter the outcome, there is a point Martin and Collins are trying to make with their book — Canadian decision-makers can be ignorant.
“It’s very interesting that in the day of media and monopolies, politicians can package themselves in ways they wouldn’t normally be,” says Martin. “FRANK’s unedited, so it shows them as regular people without a grasp on certain issues, and these are the Joe Schmoes running our country.”
Other pranks in the book don’t have such devasting effects, such as the call aimed at CTV’s chief news anchor and senior news editor, Lloyd Robertson.
Collette Wright, Robertson’s assistant, handled the call. Robertson was offered the chance to make an appearance playing himself on a recast of the CBC comedy The Newsroom, which he declined.
“That’s good innocent fun,” says Robertson of the incident.
“There’s no difference between that and a television parody, there’s nothing wrong with that.”