Achtung! Simon Cowell loves prank calling his showbiz pals pretending to be German, Louis Walsh has revealed.
Louis, 70, who was a judge alongside Cowell on the X Factor, said his former boss would put on a dodgy accent and ring out of the blue posing as a man called Wolfgang.
He said: “One day I was walking in London and my phone rang and I answered.
“He said ‘This is Wolfgang in Germany, you are Mr Walsh, you manage the Westlife?’
“I said ‘yeah’. He said ‘I want to talk to you, we have a really big deal for yoghurt in Germany, would you be interested? Do the boys like yoghurt’.
“I didn’t know so I said ‘yeah, they will’. And it was him, he was always taking the p*ss out of me.”
Louis also revealed another of Cowell’s practical jokes – getting X Factor production staff to secretly make him turn orange so he looked like an Oompa Loompa.
He said: “One night he got his make-up girl to put make-up on me. He said ‘You need a bit more colour’.
“What I didn’t realise was as the show went on I was getting darker and darker. It was a tanning thing.
“And as the show went on he was roaring with laughter, Cheryl [Cole] was roaring with laughter, and I had no idea I was getting darker and darker.
“It was a prank and he loved doing that. Every day was fun with him. Every day.”
