Twistd Humor

Funny Stories 5

An award-winning group of Czech artists face jail for hacking into a TV weather broadcast to screen footage of a nuclear explosion.

Czech Television have filed a complaint over the image broadcast last June that led to a flood of panicked calls from viewers of the Panoram programme.

Peaceful scenes of the local countryside were interrupted by the clip making it look as if a nuclear bomb had gone off.

State prosecutor Dusan Ondracek is to charge six artists with "scaremongering and propagating false information" and says they could be jailed for up to three years each.

The six are all members of the artistic group called Ztohoven and the trial is set to start in under a month.

Last month, the group won a prestigious award and £12,000 prize money from the Czech National Gallery for the work, entitled Media Reality.

Milan Knizak, from the National Gallery, said: "This piece - alongside all of the art the group Ztohoven is making - is crossing the border from art into something more social.

"The artists are trying to escape from the cage of art, and into real life. They would like to influence their own lives, and other people's lives."

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