The Foo Fighters show that was never going to happen.

When a radio station prank goes badly awry.

It was a dumb idea.

Almost everyone knew it was never going to happen.

And yet, in a fifth season episode of The Office, none of that stops Michael Scott from giving it a good old go.

In an attempt to raise money to cover an office burglary he was responsible for, the fictional boss of the Scranton paper company Dunder Mifflin attempts to auction off two tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

These are good tickets: VIP seats, backstage access, the whole package. (This episode aired in 2008, so in today’s dollars, those tickets are probably worth, ooh, what, about $3000?)

But Michael doesn’t have those tickets.

He never had them.

When it comes time to auction off his tickets, Michael shuffles through his pockets and attempts to claim that they’ve been stolen too.

I was watching that episode recently – because life is tough right now and The Office is my stupid goofy happy place – and those fake Springsteen tickets kicked off a memory.

Didn’t a New Zealand radio station pull the exact same prank?

Wasn’t it around the exact same time that that particular episode of The Office aired?

And didn’t it have far more serious consequences?

Yes, yes, and OMG yes.

I went digging and the memories came flooding back.

It was 2008.

I was an online editor at Stuff.co.nz.

We were approaching April Fool’s Day, a day newsrooms are on high alert for pranks, subterfuge and stupid high-jinks. Remember, this was a time when Guy Williams tricked Paul Henry into believing he was a pro-whaling spokesperson.

Emails circulated around the newsroom as a warning, because, just a few years earlier, an editor had published a clearly doctored image of a gigantic iceberg floating past Dunedin on Stuff’s homepage as though it were real.

So, on the morning of April 1, 2008, a popular New Zealand radio station devoted to playing guitar-driven hits of yester-year decided to do something silly.

The morning hosts announced they’d made the impossible happen: they’d booked Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters to play an “an intimate acoustic show … at Auckland venue the Powerstation” later that day.

The Foo Fighters do this kind of thing. In 2003, they played Galatos the night before the Big Day Out, and in 2012 they performed a three-hour set at Auckland Town Hall as a benefit show after the Christchurch Earthquake.

They were also due in the country just a few months later for two Spark Arena shows. So fans were clearly quite interested in seeing a big band perform in a small venue. The Powerstation only holds 1000 people. It was first come, first served.

Shit kicked off. People asked for the day off work. They planned to drive up, or eagerly booked flights. No one wanted to miss this show. More than 2000 people were estimated to want tickets, which, today, seems a little on the light side.

The problem? It was all made up.

The Foos weren’t going to perform at The Powerstation because they were already on tour in Canada.

Programme director Brad King, who is still at The Rock, says those responsible expected about 50 people to show for their dumb prank. Once there, they planned to plonk a ghetto blaster on the stage then hit play on a cassette tape.

This story went wild.

It made global headlines.

Even NME covered it.

At Stuff, I spent the whole day following the saga, at one stage running up to the Powerstation to snap this quick photo of an apology taped to the doors.

The fallout was swift.

Apology messages began airing on The Rock.

King was made to front interview after interview

It caused “absolute carnage” he told me at the time. He said he’d had nothing to do with it. Instead, it came from the station’s marketing team. “This is what happens when fools plan April Fool's jokes,” King said.

What happened to those responsible? “There have certainly been some consequences.”

A few months later, in October of 2008, that episode of The Office aired.

I doubt it was inspired by the antics of a dumb radio station prank that happened down under.

But you never know.

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