Sachsgate victim's own joke

As the victim of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s lewd answerphone messages, Andrew Sachs unwittingly became a mascot for those who wanted the BBC to clean up its act. But the Fawlty Towers star once made a prank on-air phone call of his own, which got so out of hand that the police became involved.

The revelation comes on the day Channel 4's programme chief says the ‘Sachsgate’ scandal has stifled creativity within the BBC, making executives afraid to take risks.

But Sachs himself confessed he once wound up ‘an honest citizen’ with a April Fool’s joke, played at the Swansea Sound radio station in South Wales sometime in the Eighties.

His son John – who later provided the voiceover for the Gladiators TV series – used to host a show there, and persuaded his father to help out with the practical joke.

They convinced a local listener that she was speaking to their long-lost uncle in Sydney, Australia, when, in fact, it was Andrew Sachs in the next studio.

After some small talk, Sachs told the victim, in character: ‘While you’re on, darling, I had to leave the country a bit quick, you see, because we had a little trouble with the police.

‘Because I had to leave quick, I had to leave some jewellery behind. What I did with it was, erm, you know the park in the centre of town. There’s a big tree there just by the lake… and I put it in there.’

The woman protested that ‘uncle George’ shouldn’t be revealing the secrets, eventually telling him that their conversation was being broadcast live. ‘What! You’ve shopped me,’ Sachs told her – and hung up.

‘Nice joke,’ Sachs later revealed. ‘But then we had a call from the police. The whole town had gone down to the park and torn [it] up.’

Sachs confessed to the prank in an old interview on Gay Byrne’s Irish talk show The Late Late Show, below. The conversation is about to be released as part of a compilation ‘greatest hits’ DVD entitled Gaybo Laughs Back Again.

The fallout from Ross and Brand’s phone calls to Sachs, in which the stand-up boasted about sleeping with his granddaughter, continues to be felt today.

Channel 4’s Julian Bellamy has told the Royal Television Society that the BBC was avoiding controversial ideas ‘like the plague’ in the wake of the calls, which aired on Radio 2 in October last year.

He said: ‘After a string of scandals about taste and decency, it seems to avoid disruptive, potentially controversial ideas like the plague. Time and again, producers tell me this and I believe it.’

He said Channel 4 was now the ‘sole guardian of nonconformism and provocation on Britain's most powerful cultural medium’.

Published: 5 Nov 2009