Last summer, Donald Trump was giving a press conference at the reopening of his Turnberry golf resort in Ayrshire, when he noticed some small red things rolling towards him across the ninth tee. Lots of golfballs – all emblazoned with swastikas. “Sorry Mr Trump, I meant to put them out earlier,” shouted a functionary in a Trump Turnberry pullover, who then began handing out the balls to the assembled media.
“Get him out of here,” said the then presumptive Republican presidential nominee. A perhaps understandable reaction given that, a few days earlier in Las Vegas, another Brit had tried to grab a police officer’s gun and shoot Trump. “Ten seconds later I was dragged off,” recalls Simon Brodkin, who had posed as a Trump employee. “Not sure who by. His bodyguards maybe. Then I was cuffed. After a while, I started to hear Scottish voices. I’ve never been so happy.” Why? “I thought: at least I’m not going to get tortured – or shot.”
It’s quite tough being a prankster today, says Brodkin: “Terrorists have made my job very difficult. Everybody thinks you’re al-Qaida or a potential killer.” Well, not quite. As he sat cuffed in a cabin, Brodkin noticed a police sergeant eyeing him narrowly. “You’re that guy,” said the sergeant, to Brodkin’s delight. “In that moment,” he says, “I realised I had an ally.”
The sergeant actually recognised not Brodkin, but his alter ego, the prankster Lee Nelson. “They loosened the cuffs so the blood went back to my fingers and asked if I wanted some Lucozade. Big love for the Scottish police.”
Brodkin still gets a kick out of watching the press conference on YouTube. “You can see Trump is rattled. He went on to talk about being here in Florida!” Surely he could have pressed charges? “He could have, but instead his people said they would be satisfied if they threw me out of the country and the British secret services interrogated me – which I presume is a euphemism for waterboarding. And they weren’t going to do that. In the end, the police put me on the other side of the England-Scotland border. Presumably Trump’s people didn’t know I could just walk back across.”
Why Nazi golfballs? “They were the cheapest,” jokes the Londoner. But, really, what parallels were you trying to draw? “Many people are fearful of him. His vitriol towards others and his self-aggrandising make a lot of people see connections.” Between Trump and Hitler? “Yes. What I’m doing is always about making comedy connections. I have a naughty streak, an utter lack of respect for authority – and hopefully a decent sense of humour.”
Trump is just one of the prankster’s victims. He has interrupted Kanye West at Glastonbury; tried to mingle with Man City players; thrown $600 in dollar bills at Fifa’s disgraced president Sepp Blatter; hoaxed Simon Cowell by masquerading as an orthodox Jewish rapper on Britain’s Got Talent; and renamed Philip Green’s superyacht the BHS Destroyer. Fittingly, a Channel 4 documentary featuring his greatest pranks will air next Tuesday for its fake news week.
Have the people you prank got anything in common? “They’re all deserving targets,” he says – but he knows that, ultimately, his satire is unlikely to change anything. “I think maybe I’ll make a difference, then Philip Green carries on regardless. And Trump, since I pranked him, has gone on to be the leader of the free world.”
Kanye fans were livid you disrupted his gig. “The thing was, he’d interrupted Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony, saying Beyoncé should have won, so I thought it was legitimate.” He was disappointed Kanye didn’t enter into the spirit. “If it had been Oasis, they would either have decked me or made me sing a duet.”
But there is another kind of pranking, I say. A protestor called Dan Glass once glued himself to then-prime minister Gordon Brown to protest against Heathrow’s third runway. “Did he? Wow, big balls! I wouldn’t do that – I always think about my exit strategy. I make sure I’m not aggressive. I don’t want to be frightening.”
But you have more guts than, well, me. “What I love is when reality and comedy clash,” he says. Like when Sacha Baron Cohen pranked Noam Chomsky as Ali G, asking the great linguist ‘How many words does you know?’ and ‘What is some of them?’ We giggle at the memory. At least Ali G didn’t get cuffed by Chomsky’s goons.
Early in his career as a prankster, Brodkin got rough treatment – because officers didn’t know he was a comic and that it was all a prank. In 2013, going by the alter ego Jason Bent, he ran on to the pitch at Goodison Park, mingling with Man City players before being dragged off. He was charged with pitch encroachment.
When the case came to court, he maintained his dim Scouse striker alter-ego, telling the court he had only run on because his agent had told him he’d been signed by Man City. I’m astounded he wasn’t done for contempt. He shrugs. Instead, the judge gave him a six-month conditional caution. “Then I went outside to the media scrum in character.” It was the same day Carlos Tevez, then a Man City player, was convicted for drink-driving. “So I said: ‘I’d like to thank Carlos for giving me a lift to court.’”
Who are the roughest police? “The Swiss.” He’s pranked twice in Switzerland, once throwing money at Blatter and telling the press the cash was to bankroll North Korea’s World Cup bid.
And last March, Brodkin managed to get into the press launch for a new Volkswagen at the Geneva Motor Show. As VW’s Jürgen Stackmann was making a speech, Brodkin, posing as an engineer in overalls, tried to install a “cheat box”– referencing the VW emissions scandal, in which it was revealed that the manufacturer was cheating in pollution tests. “No one is going to find out about this one,” Brodkin told the audience as he tried to fit the box to the car, seconds before he was dragged off. “You know the job is a good one when you’re getting pinned down and cuffed,” he says.
“The police were quite rough. To them, I was a terrorist. When I tried to get up, they shoved me back down. I said: ‘I’m allowed a phonecall.’ And they said: ‘No you’re not – we can hold you for 24 hours without any of that.’ I kept saying, ‘Just Google me. Trust me – I’m a clown!’” Eventually someone did. “After that,” says Brodkin, one cop picked up a hatstand pretending it was a mic and said, ‘And the award for best actor goes to … Simon Brodkin.’”
Ten years ago, Brodkin was a junior doctor, doing something good for society. “I actually did put paddles on people’s chests, which was pretty cool. But I gave it up for comedy, partly because the NHS isn’t exactly a bed of roses.”
Comedy became Brodkin’s vocation partly because of something he saw on a bus. “There was a guy with his mates, and they were flobbing on each other down the stairs, with complete disregard for anyone else. One of them was the prototype for Lee Nelson. He had such swagger!” Isn’t there a risk he is looking down on real-life Lee Nelsons? “Hope not. What I like about Lee is that he’s an equal-opportunity offender. He takes the mick out of everyone. There’s no hate in him. It’s all love.”
Nelson has since taken on a life of his own. It was Nelson, not Brodkin, who stood briefly in the South Shields byelection in 2013, and Nelson who performed with street-dance duo Twist and Pulse on BBC1’s Let’s Dance for Comic Relief – winning the judges’ vote. In his current standup tour, he even expresses his opinions on Brexit. “I voted leave,” he says. “I was misled. I thought it was about Scotland.”
What about future pranks? Brodkin declines to tell me who is in his crosshairs. But surely your pranking days are numbered now that you’re becoming so known? “I don’t think so. Once a prankster, always a prankster. Last year in Monaco, while trying to deface Philip Green’s superyacht, I thought: ‘This is my job.’ And I realised I couldn’t be happier.”