The first lesson appears to be start by sucking in aides in at the bottom and working one's way up. Oh, and don't leave a callback number.
Sébastien Trudel and Marc-Antoine Audette, co-hosts of Les Cerveaux de l'info, the drive-home show on Montreal's CKOI-FM, spent five days last week persuading Ms. Palin's Republican Party staff that French President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to speak with her by phone and wish her well in tomorrow's election.
"When we started to work on the idea last Tuesday," Mr. Audette said in an interview yesterday, "we thought it would be mission impossible. But after about a dozen calls, we started to realize it might work, because her staff didn't know the name of the French President. They asked us to spell it."
Mr. Audette said there are two important tricks in making these kinds of pranks succeed. "First, you have to be extremely convincing in the preliminary calls to aides, and second, you never leave a callback number. You always arrange to place the call at a designated time." ...
With Ms. Palin, Mr. Audette and Mr. Trudel, known to their Quebec fans as les justiciers masqués (the masked avengers), pretended to be aides to Mr. Sarkozy and worked their way up over the week from relatively low-level staff in the Alaska Governor's office to more senior campaign organizers.
Only on Saturday did they learn that Ms. Palin had agreed to take the call. "We were in paradise," said Mr. Audette.
"Of course we always say at the end it's a prank. For us, it's only a joke. We're not trying to make political statements."
The online version has the audio attached.
You can also hear the interview on this YouTube clip.