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Home / World

It's the last Christmas, I give you the mic ...

By Nicola Lamb
NZ Herald·
22 Dec, 2015 03:45 PM2 mins to read

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George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley.

George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley.

A radio DJ really got into the Christmas spirit when he barricaded himself inside a studio and played Wham!'s Last Christmas 24 times.

DJ Joe Kohlhofer, from the Austrian radio station Antennae Carinthia, began his morning show with the popular festive hit and then played it on repeat.

He refused to let other staff in after he told his helpless co-host Patricia Jordan he would be doing the show on his own.

The 27-year-old DJ started his regular 8am show by announcing he felt people were not getting sufficiently into the Christmas spirit, and that as a remedy he intended to play the song non-stop throughout his two-hour show.

More than 100 fed-up listeners rang begging him to stop playing the classic George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley song, according to Austrian media reports. The radio station's Facebook page was inundated with more than 500 protests.

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"The message was clear: we had to stop the crazy host," an unnamed colleague told Kurier newspaper.

Kohlhofer eventually stopped played Last Christmas when his 4-year-old daughter was put on the line and asked him to stop. "I wanted to play it all day, but because I love my daughter so much I gave in to her request," he said. Even then, he played the song one final time after seeing he'd "only" managed 23 renditions.

The station claimed the stunt, which went on for almost two hours, was not planned in advance and later posted a photo of Kohlhofer with his mouth taped shut on Facebook.

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It is unlikely he will face any disciplinary action for the stunt.

Bizarrely, this is not the first such stunt in the German-speaking world to involve Last Christmas. Three years ago a DJ in Germany played the song 14 times in a row before his radio station solved the problem by taking him off air.Telegraph Group Ltd

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