by Dom Harvey
Actually, I made that last bit up. I’m not sure why he stopped dancing. His tap-dancing childhood is not something he is really big on talking about with his staff.
The first time it was ever mentioned on the air was by Jay-Jay. Leon came running into the studio while she was still speaking and just turned the microphones off and cut straight to a song. Then he stormed out. Just quietly, his ‘storm out’ would have been way more effective if he had those little metal tap-dancing plates on the soles of his shoes.
So, we knew Leon was good at tap dancing. We also knew Leon was embarrassed by it. Perfect! We got hold of a photo of Leon at the age of around eight or nine. In the photo he is wearing a one-piece dancing suit which looks like it is made from some highly flammable fabric. He is holding a rather show-boaty dance pose while standing in front of all his badges, trophies and ribbons. He appears to be wearing a white motorbike helmet, but that was just his well-maintained hairstyle.
As an adult, Leon is modest/embarrassed about his tap-dancing achievements but, evidently, he was pretty chuffed with himself at the time.
We came up with some copy to go along with the photo and booked a quarter-page advertisement in the New Zealand Herald.
On the day our ad appeared we spied on Leon from our studio window overlooking the office as he followed his usual morning routine. Once he’d arrived and put his things down, he sat down at a table in the open office area and proceeded to read the newspaper.
This was a nervous time for us. We knew as soon as he got to page A8 that all hell could break loose. He could be in such a rage that he’d stomp through the floor, like a modern-day Rumpelstiltskin.
He turned the page and starred at the ad. His eyes stayed on it for the best part of a minute. Then, even though he still had the sports and business sections left to read, he folded up the paper and walked towards the studio door. WE WERE SHITTING! Leon calmly poked his head in, held up the paper and asked, ‘Who gave you the photo?’
We had promised Leon’s brother we would not reveal our source, but when he was standing there in front of us Jay-Jay got nervous and caved—‘Your brother sent it to us.’
At that moment it dawned upon me just what pathetic US Navy Seals we would make. We didn’t even put up a fight to protect our source. Nobody needed to torture us. Leon simply asked and Jay-Jay cracked.
Leon walked out and nothing was said about it ever again. I’m not sure what went on between Leon and his brother after that. But his bro has not sent us any embarrassing photos since! Come to think of it, I’m not sure if anyone has seen Leon’s brother since then.
The highly offensive car sticker
Leon’s house and garage were connected by an internal access door, which was right by the driver’s door of his station wagon. Prior to commencing his thirty-five-minute drive to work in the morning he just had to walk out of his house straight into his car and was off.
If any modifications were made to the passenger side of his car, he would have absolutely no way of knowing.
One morning at 3.30 I went to Leon’s house and crept down to his garage. I walked down the back side of the house rather than the drive to avoid setting off any sensor lights. Then I got to work, carefully unpeeling and applying a giant sticker to the passenger panels of Leon’s car. This sticker was in a big black bold font and covered most of the vehicle. With the sticker in place, I managed to exit without detection. Now all we had to do was wait.
I was on the air when Leon arrived at work just before 9 am. He waved and smiled at us through the studio window. This was Leon in a good mood, like a man who’d struck every green light on his way to work.
‘That was a bizarre reaction,’ we all thought. Just moments earlier he would have parked his car and noticed the sticker. We were expecting embarrassment or anger—not a smile and a cheery wave. If we were to use the Seven Dwarves scale, we expected Leon to be Grumpy rather than Happy.
Then it occurred to us—maybe he hadn’t even noticed the sticker! This scenario seemed unlikely, though. Surely other motorists would have seen it during his commute and reacted with rude hand signals, toots or abuse.
We put a long song on and ran downstairs to find his parked car. THE STICKER WAS STILL ON THE PASSENGER DOORS. And worse still, all the parking places in the work basement had been taken, so Leon had parked on the street . . . right outside the play centre! There were mums and young kids streaming past and looking at Leon’s car. Some laughed and took photos, but most looked repulsed.
A quick team meeting was held on the street. Mike and Jay-Jay voted to take the sticker down and not even tell Leon about the whole prank. I was outnumbered. We peeled the sticker off and the joke was aborted.
Leon has never mentioned it but, in hindsight, I wonder if he did see it there and outplayed us, getting his own back by acting as though he was unaware—even parking right outside the day care on purpose. Maybe it was all part of an elaborate prank within a prank. Like the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Inception except with practical jokes instead of dreams.
The sticker on Leon’s car. Made all the more believable since research shows 82 per cent of all sex offenders drive station wagons.
Five ideas that never made it past the brainstorm stage
1. Turn Leon’s swimming pool into the world’s largest drink of Raro.
2. Paint a giant penis and scrotum on the roof of his house then reveal it to him during a hot air balloon ride.
3. Put a classified ad in the paper with his name and cell phone number for a midget men’s erotic massage service.
4. Turn a holiday snap I have of Leon working his BBQ topless into a giant billboard warning against the dangers of fat-splashes (in reference to the meat on the barbie, of course).
5. Hire six proper dwarfs and a tall dark-haired woman. They barge into a boardroom meeting Leon is leading and offer him the role of Grumpy.
The granny stripper at the staff meeting
This was to be the pinnacle of all Leon jokes. The one that staff would talk about for years to come. Staff meeting at The Edge is 11.30 every Monday morning. The meeting consists of a few staff just reading out notes about what is going on that week. Surely these notes could just be emailed to us all, I have argued, and then the need for a meeting would be eliminated? The response I got was that ‘none of you bastards would even read the notes if they were sent’. Touché.
The Edge team is a fairly small and close-knit group of about fifteen people who all get on pretty well and enjoy each other’s company, at work and outside of business hours. With this in mind I was pretty confident my idea for Leon’s birthday present would be well received by all, even the staunchly religious girl.
From the ‘Novelty’ section of the website Strippers-R-Us I had booked a granny-gram and arranged for a woman known as Saucy Sandy to meet me outside work at twenty past eleven. I’m not sure if Sandy was her actual name . . . but I can confirm she was anything but saucy!
We would wait outside until I got a text from Jay-Jay, who was in the meeting. The message would say, ‘The target is present.’ She could have just texted me, ‘Leon is here now,’ but when you’re pulling off one of these jokes that include some heist elements, you suddenly get this uncontrollable urge to pretend you’re in a James Bond film.
I was on the street with Saucy Sandy when the text came through. I told her we were ready to go. She was not quite ready, though—‘Just give me a minute, would ya love, so I can finish my durry.’
The poor old duck, probably someone’s mum and nana, was about to go into a packed boardroom full of strangers and take her clothes off. If she wanted a couple of minutes for a nerve-calming cigarette, who was I to hurry her along?
Waiting on the street was a little awkward and we attracted a lot of double-takes from motorists. Saucy Sandy was a woman in her sixties who looked like she had lived every single day of those years to the fullest. Rolled-up smoke in one hand, black leather whip in the other, she was wearing a black leather corset and
underwear with a dog collar round her neck, thigh-high fishnet stockings and black high heels—and without any pants on! She looked like what you would imagine Lady Gaga to look like forty years from now. We also had with us the Strippers-R-Us chaperone and driver who, I suspect, may also dabble in stripping as the fat-o-gram for the company. You couldn’t blame people for their curiosity—we did look like a very odd trio standing there on the street.
When Sandy had finished her durry we walked up the stairs and through the bustling reception area, past offices and studios, to the boardroom. I’m not sure who was more nervous at this point, Saucy Sandy or me. Was this going to be taking things too far? Would this be crossing the line? I started to get terrified this could backfire.
I opened the door to the boardroom. Saucy Sandy and her large chaperone remained hidden out of sight. I walked in and discreetly passed Saucy Sandy’s CD to Mike Puru, who got it cued up and ready to play in the stereo. As usual, Leon sat at the head of the table, which was conveniently positioned right next to the door.
‘Leon, since it’s your birthday and we all think you’re such a wonderful boss, we got you something that you will never ever forget.’ I made a point of using the word ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ because that sort of suggested shared blame for what was about to happen. Gutless, I know, but there was no way I wanted to take full credit for this one!
‘But first can we all sing happy birthday to our fearless leader?’
All the Edge staff at the meeting joined in for a raucous version of the birthday song. Leon sat there blushing, squirming. He must have known something was up but the question was what!
‘Okay, guys, can we please have a big round of applause for Leon’s birthday present . . . Saucy Sandy!’
Cue music: Metallica, ‘Enter Sandman’.
The song starts slow and builds up. For the first twenty or thirty seconds everybody sat looking toward the open door, just waiting for something to happen, and then she appeared. She locked eyes with Leon as she leaned on the door frame. She then stretched out her right arm and pointed her whip at him. Next she slapped the palm of her left hand with her whip and swung it around softly as she walked towards him.
Everybody was in hysterics, apart from Leon, who just looked mortified. He kept his chair tucked in under the table and would not make eye contact with his living and breathing gift.
As the music built everybody clapped along in time. Saucy Sandy stood right beside Leon. She removed her long leather coat, a bit like that one Keanu Reeves wore in The Matrix, and placed her foot up on the arm of his chair, the big tattoo on her thigh—a wolf in the moonlight—only inches away from his face. She danced around his chair, then gently whipped his chest a couple of times. Leon looked bewildered—frightened, actually. But he was laughing, which was an encouraging response.
Then Saucy Sandy put her whip on the table and reached out to take off Leon’s shirt. He quickly put a halt to this and refused to remove his top, even when his staff all started an enthusiastic chant: ‘Shirt off, shirt off, shirt off!’
And this is where things started to get a little bit weird. Realising she was not going to have her wicked way with the birthday boy, Saucy Sandy brought in her fully clothed plus-size chaperone and bent her over the boardroom table and started whipping her right next to Leon! So close to Leon, in fact, that the chaperone’s boobs, each the size of a ripe watermelon, buried his iPhone, which was sitting on the table next to him.
Saucy Sandy then dismissed her helper and turned her attention back to Leon as she started removing what little clothing she actually had on.
She took her corset off to reveal a black bra.
Unsure where to look, Leon settles for the saggy boobs.
That is when Leon turned and gave me a throat-slitting motion. Now this could mean one of three things:
1. He wanted me to cut the music and call off his present.
2. He literally wanted to get a knife and slit my throat.
3. All of the above.
I hesitated. Everyone was having such a good time. There were seventeen people in the room and sixteen people were enjoying themselves—that was a pretty good strike rate, I thought.
‘HARVEY! KILL IT NOW!’ Leon shouted over the Metallica music. He was serious. His eyes were bulging.
His eyes only ever bulged when he was in a rage. I was in the shit. Big time.
We stopped the music and everybody gave Sandy the applause she deserved.
I guided Saucy Sandy and her chaperone down to their car and could still hear the laughter and chatter coming from the boardroom upstairs.
When I sheepishly returned, Leon was just wrapping up the most unusual meeting of his career. ‘And the best news for the day?’ he joked. ‘Dom is now suspended tomorrow!’
I was not suspended. But this did make me wonder, what exactly does a guy have to do to get suspended around this place?
GET SUSPENDED FROM WORK
Incredibly, in twenty years of radio I have only been suspended on one occasion. I reckon part of the reason for this might be because radio employers know there is nothing a breakfast announcer would like more than a morning or two off work. The true punishment is to keep us working so we have to get up in what is essentially the middle of the night.
I was suspended in February 2010. The suspension was only for one day but it was actually rather enjoyable—I woke up at around 7.30, which may sound early to some people but, believe me, when you are used to getting up at 4.30 am this is a sleep-in of Sunday morning proportions.
After waking up on my day off as a condemned man I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast—the kind I imagine a normal human being would have before they start their nine-to-five workday. This probably sounds like an inane detail but usually my breakfast, which consists of a bowl of cereal, is wolfed down in under three and a half minutes. Over the years I have perfected the art of eating a bowl of Sultana Bran in the space of one pop song. It does not make for pleasant viewing, watching me eat. I actually look more dog than human. But if I don’t manage to get it eaten before the song finishes and we go back on the air, it may be soggy by the time the voice break is over. These are the sorts of problems that a music radio DJ faces on a daily basis—she’s a hard life!
The suspension came only a week after I had arranged a granny-dominatrix stripper as a present for the boss at a full staff meeting, so I was already skating on thin ice. Still, the suspension came as a surprise and to begin with I thought my boss, Leon, was having a laugh when he said, ‘Don’t bother coming in tomorrow—you’re suspended for a day without pay.’
We push the boundaries a fair bit. You have to in commercial music radio to stand out from the crowd. Every station has access to the same music, so the point of difference has to be the stuff that goes in between those songs. This sort of pressure sometimes means you do stupid things—things you would rather not do but know will probably get you some sort of a reaction.
Leon is usually our biggest cheerleader—he even shields us from a lot of the complaints that come in about stuff we have done. But this particular day, he was furious.
Alison Mau, the attractive TV newsreader, was married to the attractive TV news reader Simon Dallow. Then they broke up and she started a same-sex relationship with a dance teacher, making them the hottest lesbian couple in New Zealand. When I read this in one of the Sunday newspapers it excited me immensely.
The next morning on our radio show, just after 8 am, I sang a little song I had written about it to the tune of the Beyoncé hit ‘Single Ladies’.
Ali’s into ladies (× 7)
She’s given guys up
Broke up with Si coz he’s a guy
Decided men weren’t her thing
Didn’t need Dallow
Or any other fella
Wanted to go rug-munchin’
She’s into chicks, got sick of dick
Wanted to try some new things
Met a nice girl, gave gay a whirl
And
now what I really want to know . . .
When they make love do they have to put a strap on it?
When they make love do they have to put a strap on it?
Has she thought about making a tape of it?
When they make love do they have to put a strap on it?
Oh oh oh oh oh oh ohhh oh oh oh oh oh oh ohh (× 2)
The lyrics were appalling. And the singing was even more offensive. Nobody else wanted to sing it so I was left with no option but to do it myself. After the show finished, Jay-Jay, Mike and I all went into Leon’s office for a meeting. This was nothing out of the ordinary—every day after the show we have a meeting to discuss what worked well and what didn’t, then we start planning the following show. We sat down and I was ready for some feedback. Leon is a hard guy to read but I thought he would like the song—he and I have a similar sense of humour. The response from the audience had been mostly good. There were, as you would expect, a couple of complaints from parents who said the car ride to work and school was uncomfortable because they had to explain what the terms ‘rug-munching’ and ‘strap-on’ meant.
I brought it up in the meeting.
‘So, what about that Alison Mau story? How hot is that, eh?’
‘Yeah. About that,’ Leon said calmly, before exploding like a bottle of Diet Coke with some Mentos mints dropped in. ‘What the FUCK were you thinking?’
‘What do you mean?’ I replied, even though I knew exactly what he meant.
‘That song at eight o’clock in the fucking morning! What were you thinking?’
‘Come on, mate. Admit it. It was funny!’ I reasoned.
‘Not at 8 am it wasn’t! How long have you been doing this? I expect way better judgement than that.’
Then he turned his attention to my long-suffering co-hosts Jay-Jay and Mike. ‘And as for you two. You guys are in the studio as well, why didn’t you stop this from going to air?’
Good one. So Leon was pissed at me. And now Jay-Jay and Mike were too. It is never that much fun having 75 per cent of the room hating your guts. ‘Don’t bother coming in to work tomorrow!’ Leon spat. ‘I’m going to have to suspend you for the day, without pay.’