From television revealing that spaghetti grows in trees to pictures of the Loch Ness monster, the tradition of April Fool’s’ Day stories in the media has a long and bizarre history.
Newspaper hoaxes first began to appear in the early 19th century, mainly in America. One of the very first was a series of New York Sun articles in 1835 about life on the moon, supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. Another involved the Boston Post announcing that at a cavern of gold and jewels had been found on Boston common, leading to hundreds of readers setting out in the rain in search of the treasure.
British publications were rather less inclined towards to such frolics but after the BBC‘s spaghetti harvest hoax of 1957, Fleet Street began to lighten up and carry more daring jokes.
The spoof though, by which all others are measured is the Guardian‘s 1977 San Serriffe travel guide in, a seven-page travel supplement to a non-existent island which was described throughout using an obscure vocabulary composed entirely of printing terms. The success of this hoax is widely credited with inspiring the British media’s enthusiasm for April the first jokes in subsequent years.
The Guardian has revisited the island at least twice since 1977, as well as carrying spoofs ranging from a Men’s page to the news of Prince Charles becoming countryside tsar. There was also 1990’s Guardian for Sunday. Published on 31 March 1990, with the giveaway dateline Sunday 1 April 1990, the 36-page newsprint tabloid came two months after the launch of the Independent on Sunday. As Ian Mayes, former readers’ editor of the Guardian and currently writing the third volume of the official history of the paper explains:
On the front page of the Guardian for Sunday, there was an exclusive story revealing that Mrs Thatcher was putting her family home in Dulwich on the market since she had decided to reside permanently in Downing Street, not an unimaginable event in 1990. ‘Number Ten and Chequers are all the homes we have need of,’ she was quoted as saying. Another feature was Salman Rushdie on ‘A room of my own’ – taking its name from a series in the Observer, which the Guardian did not yet own. Rushdie, who had been in hiding for just over a year, since the fatwa of February 1989, described a room in a clapperboard [sic, there was no corrections column then] building in the Falklands Islands, somewhere in the area of Goose Green. The photograph showed an orange ‘neighbourhood watch’ sticker in the window.
The books pages reflected the not uncommon view that such pages were customarily in the hands of a small elite. Martin Amis reviewed Margaret Drabble; Margaret Drabble reviewed Blake Morrison; Blake Morrison reviewed Julian Barnes; Julian Barnes reviewed Martin Amis … and so on. The impending publication of the Guardian for Sunday had been reported po-faced as a real event in the trade press, and champagne now had to be dispatched to all the trade reporters who had been taken in. As a tour de force it ranked with the invention of the island of San Serriffe whose discovery was announced in the Guardian on 1 April 1977
We’ve compiled a list of Guardian and Observer April Fools stories going back to 1974. However, we’re missing a few so please let us know if you can remember others.
For more April foolery see Martin Wainwright’s The Guardian Book of April Fool’s Day. See also the GNM education centre’s site.
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