Ordinary Gweilo

Today is April Fools day. I haven’t seen any amusing jokes, but given that I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio in the morning, and didn’t read a newspaper today, I suppose that’s hardly surprising.

I deduce from BWG‘s comments that one of the local TV stations had an April Fools story this morning. I imagine that, like virtually all such japes, it was fairly obvious that it was not true – it’s usually easy to tell, and they add in plenty of obvious clues just to make sure.

April Fools jokes are much more prevalent in the UK, and London Zoo allegedly stop answering their phones for the day and have a recorded message warning people that ‘Mr Lion’, ‘Mr Tiger’ and “Elly Fant” are not available. Hilarious stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

One of the most famous April Fools jokes in the UK was a report on Panorama (the long-running current affairs programme) about spaghetti growing on trees. I suppose that when it was first shown (before I was born) there was much less interest in (or knowledge of) “foreign” food, and some people would have believed that spaghetti really did grow on trees.

One of the most persistent offenders is The Guardian, and some of their hoaxes have been quite elaborate – they once printed a special supplement about the island of San Seriffe, with several pages packed full of jokes about typefaces and other printing terminology.

Inevitably, some of the jokes don’t quite work out. TV-AM, who had the franchise for breakfast TV on the ITV channel, decided to announce (on Sunday 1 April 1984) that Albert Tatlock, a character on “Coronation Street”, a very long-running soap also on ITV, had died – pretending that he was a real character. Unfortunately Jack Howarth, the actor who played the character, actually died on 31 March at the age of 88. The problem was that the programme had already been recorded (as was their normal practice, to save money). Incredibly, it was broadcast as normal with captions announcing that the actor had died – which made the ‘joke’ seem very tasteless indeed.

On the other hand, some jokes merely anticipate real developments. I remember “Music Week”, the UK trade magazine for the music industry, running a front-page story about a new invention from Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson:

[the] “music box” would download music directly to your hi-fi using a computer chip and your telephone line. The story duly ran and, before people realised it was a joke, the share prices of several record companies went down for at least a few hours. Little did I know that I was talking about something that had already been invented called the internet.

This was about 20 years ago!