6 Of The Best: April Fool's Day Jokes
It may have its origins in the mediaeval French calendar, but April Fool's Day is alive and well in the UK. Every year newspapers, TV shows and websites do their best to pull a fast one - whether it's spaghetti on trees or news of a new national anthem. Here's our pick of the best.
Spaghetti harvesting
The BBC's Panorama prank definitely stands the test of time. This 1957 joke featured the beyond-reproach Richard Dimbleby reporting from an Italian field, talking about how the beginning of April was a critical time for the Italian spaghetti harvest. It's believed to be the first time that television was used to pull an April Fool stunt. The feature was met with a mixed response - some viewers called up asking where they could purchase spaghetti trees, whilst others condemned the broadcaster for lacking gravitas.
Holidaying on San Serriffe
Back in 1977 the Guardian chose April 1 to issue a seven-page special report supplement on the island state of San Serriffe. Citing his inspiration as The Financial Times which 'was always doing special reports on little countries I’d never heard of', section editor Philip Davies said, 'I was thinking about April Fool’s Day 1977 and I thought: why don’t we just make a country up?' For anyone not well versed in printing terminology, Sans Serif is a typographical term for print letters such as the ones you're reading now which don't feature little curls at the end. All the advertisers in the report were in on the joke and travel agencies were apparently swamped with people demanding to go on holiday to the fictional islands.
We come in peace
When Surrey policemen were called out to a potential UFO crash site in 1987 you have to wonder whether they checked their calendar first and seeing that it was 31 March thought they were safe. Hundreds of people had reported seeing a silver craft crashing into a field. But when the policemen turned up expecting to find little green men they found a red-faced human instead. It was Virgin businessman Richard Branson who'd planned an April Fool stunt to land a spacecraft in London's Hyde Park but had been blown off course and forced to land a day earlier than planned.
A Guiness minute
In 1998 the Financial Times was completely taken in by a press release from the drinks company Guinness which issued a press release saying they were sponsoring Greenwich Mean Time for the Millennium New Year. For the next year, GMT would be renamed Guinness Mean Time. The Financial Times reprinted the story as fact and was then forced to issue a correction saying that the article was 'apparently intended as part of an April 1 spoof'.
The Prince of Fools
The Today programme ensnared an altogether better class of Foolee when they came up with a Euro wheeze in 1999. Reports that the UK would ditch the national anthem in favour of a European tune with the words in German sung to music by Beethoven had Prince Charles's staff calling the station for more information. Later on, the royal staff insisted that they knew all along it was an April Fool - a likely story!
Do pandas lay eggs?
A generation of children might have grown up thinking that Pandas lay eggs thanks to a particularly inventive April Fool courtesy of John Craven's Newsround. The children's current affairs show made a point of always running an April Fool's Day item. In 2005 they featured headbands that helped children pass exams and in 2004 they claimed that the solar system was about to be renamed after characters in The Lord of the Rings - with Earth being retitled Gandalf.
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