Spaghetti harvests, lunar conspiracies and dinosaurs...
I always used to make a point of tuning into the BBC’s Nationwide every year on the first of April. You could guarantee that, amongst the serious news stories, there would be one spurious item intended as an April fool’s joke. As I well knew, the joke was on the BBC for pulling an April fool stunt after midday – according to the age old tradition, April fool was a decidedly pre-prandial activity and if you played a trick on anyone after noon, you became the fool yourself.
The origins of the April fool tradition are unknown – some scholars believe there is a 14th century reference in Chaucer, but this is debated. Television adopted the tradition relatively early, with the first recorded instance occurring in 1957, perpetrated by no less an authority than Panorama. The ‘Spaghetti Harvest’ film, purporting to show the pasta dish growing on trees, became famous, notorious even. The item, featuring deadpan narration by the corporation’s voice of authority Richard Dimbleby, convinced many viewers, who were unused to being hoodwinked by broadcasters. I wasn’t even born at the time, but I remember seeing the clip when it was exhumed years later during a BBC retrospective.
By the 1970s, the task of dreaming up such televisual tricks had been passed on to Nationwide, whose content usually found room for a whimsical or quirky news report. A collection of examples can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/articles/c4nnnwr9rr9o. I certainly remember seeing the ‘Jurassic Park’ spoof when it went out in 1980 (ten years before Michael Crichton’s novel), which is typical in that it builds from what at first appears to be a serious feature, with the gag only being revealed towards the end. I mentioned the spoof in my diary, together with one from the Daily Express about busby hats that grew themselves.
A couple more from my diary for 1982 were a ‘drop-head beer’ with the froth at the bottom, seen on the BBC’s Midlands Today, and a Concorde simulator featured on Russell Harty’s chat show… or was it? The Concorde simulator was in fact a reality, built in 1974 at a cost of £3m to train British Airways crew. This illustrates the danger of televised April Fool gags – once you’ve seen one, you can’t take anything else seriously for the rest of the evening.
In 1977, ITV planned an elaborate and expensive April fool in the form of a documentary, Alternative 3. This conspiracy theory scenario described how plans were under way to make the surfaces of the moon and Mars habitable as a last resort in the event of a global environmental catastrophe. Unlike the lighthearted items that the BBC went in for, this was heavier stuff, much more the kind of thing that is perpetrated today by 'real life' conspiracy theorists. The joke backfired when the producers, Anglia Television, were unable to secure a slot on the desired date. The programme eventually went out on the decidedly unfunny 20th of June, leaving some viewers baffled and others angry – much like the reaction to Panorama’s spaghetti film of twenty years earlier. Alternative 3 was never repeated, and the DVD (issued to mark the film’s 30th anniversary) was sourced from the only surviving 16mm print.
Pulling April fool pranks may have been a Nationwide tradition, but the programme only went out five nights a week, and on years when April 1 fell on a Saturday or Sunday, it was harder to know who, if anyone, was being less than serious. When April 1 fell on a Sunday, as it did in 1978 and 1984, the role of corporation court jesters fell to the That's Life team, as can be seen from the BBC’s compilation (above). I remember both of these items, although I’m not sure if I spotted the fact that ‘Lirpa Loof’ was in fact April Fool spelled backwards until Esther pointed it out at the end of the clip. Anagrams often featured in these media pranks. One Nationwide gag involved something called the ‘prialofol’ grub, the exact nature of which eludes me (‘prialofol’ is, unsurprisingly, a Googlewhack, returning no results whatsoever – so perhaps nobody else remembers it).
Comics often featured April fool stories, but rather than make fools of their young readers, they would have the characters playing pranks on each other as can be seen on this Dandy cover from 1965.
Today, you’re unlikely to find any kind of spoofery amongst the BBC’s news and current affairs output. The corporation has recently blown a chunk of your licence fee on an incredibly self-righteous promotional film extolling the squeaky clean virtues of BBC news gathering and its factual reliability (narrated by the equally squeaky clean Clive Myrie), and BBC news regularly runs a ‘fact check’ on items of contentious content. In the light of all this, they’re hardly likely to be indulging in the kind of wool-over-the-eyes schoolboy japery that we used to find on Nationwide and elsewhere. In an era when media outlets are rife with fake news and delusional ideas, April fool silliness is more likely to be found in the social media feeds of prominent brands. Sometimes, a double bluff is played, by announcing an unlikely but real product or event on April 1.
As for myself, I am this year involved in a minor April fool endeavour, which went live this morning: the XTC podcast ‘What Do You Call That Noise’ this month looks back to the band’s own April Fool jape, a cod psychedelic album released under the pseudonym The Dukes of Stratosphear. In celebration of the album’s 40th anniversary, the podcasters have concocted a surreal show in a Chris Morris vein, featuring ‘fake’ music from a variety of contributors, two of whom are me.
It can be found here:
No kidding!
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| Alternative 3 - ITV's April Fool that missed the date. |
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