No fooling about April 1 pranks

This week has seen the media once again taking South Africans for a merry ride with all manner of far-fetched April Fool’s Day stories.

And in spite of the publication date of this issue of The Southern Cross being April 1, I decided that rather than attempt any April Fool trickery on our readers, most of whom would be reading this only on Sunday April 5, I would look at some memorable April Fool pranks. Here are some of the best I’ve come across:

In the mid-1970s, the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47am a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes.

The planet Pluto, he said, would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity.

Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation.

After 9:47am had just passed, BBC2 received hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her 11 friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room!

The “Swiss Spaghetti Harvest” prank a few years later also involved the BBC, this time the respected BBC TV news show Panorama. It announced that thanks to a mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees.

Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

In 1962 there was only one television channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. The station’s technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that, thanks to a new technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to display colour reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their TV screens.

Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of people were taken in. Regular colour broadcasts coincidentally began in Sweden on — you guessed it — April 1, 1970.

In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica.

The Guardian’s telephones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Only a few noticed that everything about the island was named after printers’ terminology. (Bodoni is the name of a classic typeface).

The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades.

In 1992, National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” programme in the United States announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for president again. His new campaign slogan was: “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.”

Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Mr Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a practical joke. Mr Nixon’s voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.

Still in the US, in 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” hamburger specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans.

According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper, but all the condiments were rotated 180° for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants asking for the new hamburger. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version”.

After reading and chuckling at all the April Fool’s day hoaxes every year, I am always left with the same thought: If so many people are that gullible and seem to believe everything they hear, read and see in the media, editors and journalists surely have a far greater responsibility to pursue truth than they ever believed possible.