HOW TO… STAY COOL ON APRIL FOOL’S
INVADERS FROM MARS? BIG BEN GOING ANALOGUE? SPAGHETTI HARVESTS? IF YOU’RE TIRED OF PRANKS, PUNKS AND PUT-ONS FROM ‘REPUTABLE’ SOURCES, KICK CREDULITY TO THE CURB THIS COMING APRIL
TEXT ALAN NEEDHAM | ILLUSTRATION HENRY OBASI
As you’d expect of an occasion buried in half-truths and outright lies, the true origins of April Fool’s Day are shrouded in mystery. One suggestion – popularised by an episode of The Simpsons – states that it’s to do with the Christians taking the mickey out of their pagan chums for starting their New Year on 1 April.
So why do we still celebrate April Fool’s Day? Apart from the fact that it is possibly the only annual event that doesn’t involve having to spend any money, maybe it’s because we love getting one over on (or, to use the parlance of the day, “punking”) each other, and 1 April is the only day that we’re semi-officially allowed to do it. But what are the best ways to go about it, and how do you protect yourself?
DON’T DO IT TO THE KIDS
April Fool’s Day 1976 in a junior school classroom: Miss Heaton, after taking the register, announces that for one day only there will be a special school dinner with a menu consisting of dinosaurs that have been found preserved in ice at the North Pole. After taking orders for Brontoburgers, T-Rex T-Bone Steak and Chips, and Pterodactyl Crispy Pancakes, she informs the class – of which I am part – that it was an April Fool’s joke. Eight years later, I leave secondary school with one CSE in English. Coincidence? I think not. Moral: if they’re still young enough to believe in Santa, don’t use your authority to crush their imaginations.
OR THE ELDERLY
The majority of them already believe that the world is going to hell in a handcart and will react to any indication of radical (and insane) change by merely tutting. See: Australia converting to metric time (This Day Tonight, 1975), police in Indiana cutting costs by closing from 6pm to 6am (Kokomo Tribune, 1959), and Big Ben changing its analogue clock faces to digital ones (BBC Radio 4, 1980). If you must, simply mention that the EU is introducing… (insert your own mentalist idea here). Works every time.
AVOID THE MEDIA ENTIRELY
They’re all at it! Virtually every newspaper inserts its own fake story on 1 April, while sportingly exposing everyone else’s. Possibly the greatest newspaper hoax ever was perpetrated by the Daily Mail in 1982, when it reported that 10,000 bras had been accidentally made with copper support wire that interfered with TV and radio signals, leading to the chief engineer of British Telecom sending round a memo decreeing that all female staff must submit details of the type of bra they wore to work. As for TV itself, there was the 1957 Panorama report concerning a bumper harvest of spaghetti crops in southern Switzerland, where the camera crew hung tons of the stuff from bushes (resulting in a flood of letters from viewers asking how they could grow their own. Official BBC reply: “Place a sprig of spaghetti into a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”). But our favourite is the Swedish TV news report in 1962 which announced that all black-and-white sets (ie: all the TV sets in Sweden in 1962) could easily be converted to colour by stretching a pair of tights over the screen. Thousands of people (ie: 90% of Swedish people who owned TVs in 1962) tried it. Some even said it worked.
If you own a radio or TV station, Halloween can be even more fun, as you can take advantage of an already keyed-up populace by scaring them with hoax broadcasts. The classic example – of course – is the Orson Welles radio production of War Of The Worlds in 1938, which was listened to by an estimated six million people unaware that the news report about a Martian invasion was a fib. Carnage ensued. When an Ecuadorian radio station did its own version in 1949, it set off a riot. Oops. Us modern-day sorts are more cynical, it seems. When CBS broadcast Without Warning, a mock broadcast of an alien invasion, in 1994, it inspired a flood of phone calls to rival TV stations, asking them why they hadn’t reported the news of meteors slamming into the Earth.
For maximum effect, be stern and authoritarian for the rest of the year. Patrick Moore pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes ever in 1976, when he announced on Radio 2 that the alignment of Pluto and Jupiter would result in a decrease of gravity on Earth at 9.47am that day – guess which one – and if people jumped at that time, they would experience a sensation of extreme lightness. The station was bombarded with hundreds of calls claiming that it worked.
But the reigning April Fool’s champions are the usually po-faced Russian media, who have conned their comrades into believing ludicrous stories such as a factory making diamond-encr usted grenades for the Mafia, the renewal of the Warsaw Pact in 1996 (which caused widespread panic in the Czech Republic, for obvious reasons) and Diego Maradona joining Spartak Moscow in 1988.
DON’T TAKE IT TOO FAR
There’s punking, and there’s outright malice. On 1 April 1998 an Iraqi paper owned by Saddam Hussein’s son announced that the USA had lifted sanctions on the country; the next year it claimed that rations had been extended to include bananas, Pepsi and chocolate. All, needless to say, lies. There’s a tradition of cruel pranking in Iraq: on 1 April 2003 the Iraqi ambassador to Russia announced that the US had accidentally fired a nuclear missile at British soldiers, before shouting, “April Fool’s!”
If you want to avoid the pranks entirely, you’ll have to leave the country. Although April Fool’s Day is pretty much a worldwide event these days (even China’s joining in with what it would have once denounced as “Liar’s Day”), there’s plenty of hiding places around the world – mainly in Spain and Latin America, where they don’t think that being made a fool of is very funny in the least. And this from the people behind the bolero jacket!
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