Prankster who interrupted BBC’s live football coverage with ‘porn noises’ reveals how he did it
The prankster behind BBC’s Wolves vs Liverpool football coverage being interrupted by ‘porn noises’ during a live broadcast on Tuesday has revealed how he did it.
For almost 15 very embarrassing minutes, Gary Lineker’s voice was drowned out by the noises, before Lineker revealed the culprit, tweeting a picture of what appeared to be a small mobile phone which had been hidden in the studio.
‘Well, we found this taped to the back of the set,’ Lineker wrote on Twiter alongside the picture of the device. ‘As sabotage goes it was quite amusing.’
YouTuber and prankster Jarvo69 later took credit for the incident, sharing a video online of him ringing a burner phone and causing the noises.
And he’s now revealed how it all went down.
The 30-year-old wandered into Molineux stadium on Monday with a friend, pretending to be a part of a film crew and filming fake interviews, when he planted the phone.
‘These things are all about confidence,’ he told The Sun. ‘We got in because we made it look like we were meant to be there, so no one bats an eyelid.’
He continued: ‘Our plan was to strap it under a chair or the table, but they might’ve got suspicious if we started moving stuff around.
‘So we strapped it to the top of the wall and because of the colour no one could see it.’
He added: ‘Staff didn’t say anything. I was tempted to jump in the home changing room ice bath but didn’t have a towel.
‘I also used the toilet in the away dressing room, which is terrible — it’s like a PE changing room from the 90s. After we planted the phone, we had a beer and got out.’
Jarvo rang the phone at 1am on Tuesday to check it hadn’t yet been found, before the real prank happened shortly after the BBC’s live coverage began.
Reflecting on the prank, he added to the publication: ‘Those situations are so funny because no one has been in it before. You could see they were panicking but Lineker is such a pro and handled it really well.
‘Everyone seems to have loved it. I feel like we’ve cheered up the nation a bit at a bad time.’
While he appeared red-faced and confused at the time, Lineker has now revealed he knew exactly what was going down.
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Appearing on Newsnight after the game, the former footballer joked: ‘If you’d told me this morning I’d be on Newsnight talking about a porn scandal, I’d have been terrified. Thankfully it was just something that happened in the studio.’
He went on to admit that it didn’t take him too long to figure out where the sounds might be coming from.
‘When it started I did recognise that sound, I think we’ve all been done with that when you open up a Whatsapp or something, or somebody has sent it to you as a trick on the train or when you’re busy in people’s company,’ he said.
‘It was quite difficult to cope with the pre-match build up and I thought maybe it had gone to one of the pundits’ phones, but then I thought no, it’s too loud. Then we obviously worked out it was a prank.
‘It was so loud I couldn’t hear anything from Danny Murphy or Paul Ince, or even when I spoke to Alan Shearer. We had like five minutes more to go, is it going to stop? Every time we went to a VT it stopped, so then I thought it was being done by somebody watching the TV and waiting until we come on.’
The BBC later issued an official apology, with a short statement reading: ‘We apologise to any viewers offended during the live coverage of the football this evening. We are investigating how this happened.’
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