Dad plays a trick on the family with the atomic bomb

The following two-minute clip, shot by Coldicutt and tweeted by his fiancé’s brother, Alan Redhead, shows the amateur videographer in his living room, watching a bright red television screen.

A BBC and state-sponsored program entitled “Emergency Show” then warns audiences to “prepare to take shelter 14 days after the strike”. Meanwhile, a creepily monotonous narrator can be heard advising viewers to build an “inner sanctuary away from windows and doors” to protect them from “radiation sickness” from fallout.

At this point, Coldicutt calls his fiancee, whereupon she rushes downstairs with the couple’s 3-year-old son, Louie Coldicutt, in tow.

“Is this a joke?” the incredulous redhead stutters as he hears the mock show. Then the panicked parent takes the bait and calls her mother, Ann Redhead, 61, with the “bad news” and screams hysterically that an “attack is imminent” and “make sure to stay indoors”.

At that moment, her happy husband-to-be can’t hold back and starts laughing out loud, whereupon redhead realizes that she has been cheated on.

“He’s lucky to be alive, trust me,” she told SWNS. “He almost gave me a heart attack. I thought the Russians were coming.”

She added: “I can honestly say I feel like I’ve witnessed the start of a world war. That’s how it felt. It felt real.”

Redhead says she’s seen the humor in the prank by now, insisting, “I’ve watched it over and over again because I keep laughing at myself.”

“I’ll try to get him back with one prank, but I don’t think anything can top him if he causes WWIII,” she added.

Suffice to say, the mindless stunt didn’t sit well with many social media users with a tweet: “Yeah hilarious. I bet people in a real nuclear threat would piss off about it.”

“And who says that can’t happen anyway if it escalates? [Russia] the largest country in the world,” they added.

Another horrified gawker fumed, “Yes because my family in Ukraine would find this hilarious right now while their home has been wiped out, their young children are now homeless and friends/colleagues are found dead. Hold on tight.”

One gallows humor enthusiast said he would have happily pulled a prank if it hadn’t been pulled during the international crisis mentioned above.

“Look, I see the humor in it” They write. “If you did that at a different time it would be hilarious … but to do it now is just really unmusical. There are people in Ukraine for whom these messages on TV are real. Spare them a thought.”

However, Coldicutt insists that he didn’t think about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia when he designed the prank.

“The situation in Ukraine didn’t even cross my mind, so that’s not the point,” he said, before joking smugly that his wife “would never be able to top it”.

“I won the war and the battle,” he boasted.

The United Nations recently reported that 227 civilians died and 525 were injured between February 24, when the invasion began, and March 1. However, they noted that they are likely underestimating the number of casualties.