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April Fools Day
April 1 is a time for tomfoolery in the British press. It's been a while since anyone but the most dim-witted reader was caught out by the made-up stories published in the name of April Fools' Day. Instead, the annual fun has become more self-referential, with a wry look at the dominant concerns of the newspaper's readers and the leading stories of the day.
The Guardian, for example, leads with a story by one "Avril de Poisson on how Gordon Brown has appointed Carla Bruni-Sarkozy to head a committee designed to bring more style and glamour to British life.
The French first lady's Dior costumes, it says, will be adopted by middle-of-the-road British brand to reflect a more Anglo-Saxon practicality, with the addition of roomier pockets and places to stow one's mobile phone. Mme Bruni's committee will investigate ways that continental je ne sais quoi might have been applied to solve peculiarly British problems like Binge Drinking.
OK, so it's not hilarious, but it's not completely unbelievable following the widespread Carlamania that gripped the UK papers during the Sarkozy visit. Moreover, British newspapers (led by the Guardian) tend to make a fuss of how much better our continental cousins run their lives and societies. Indeed, 24 hour drinking was a hopelessly naive Blairite measure which hoped to introduce European-style café culture to Britain's mean streets.
Offer British yobs flexible opening hours, and rather than fighting, rutting and vomiting being our national pastimes, we'll all suddenly start wearing loafers without socks and stroll along with our families nodding at friends and neighbours sat in pavement cafés... now that's funny.
This being the Guardian, it gets into the spirit of April Fools' Day by publishing a set of portraits of the dead and dying.
It's a measure of how much impact the Sarkozy visit had on the Brits that the nation's top selling paper chose to base one of its April Fools' Day story on the Presidential couple. The Sun runs with the news that "tiny" Nicolas Sarkozy will undergo surgery (performed by "Israeli academic Professor Ura Schmuck") to make him taller.
Euroscepticism is always fertile territory for the Sun's pranks - and of course, in the wacky world of the European Union, where pint measures are frowned on and bananas regulated for curvature, one can never tell what's true and what's invented. This year, the EU Commission is said to have voted to replace 60 minute hours with 100 minute versions. The new "day" will no longer have 24 hours but 10.
Sounds familiar. Didn't they do this last year (The Sun, not the Commission).
New technology is always a good bet for April Fools stories. Thanks to cheaper travel and the internet, we know a great deal more about foreign cultures than our parents did, so that old BBC broadcast about Italians harvesting spaghetti from trees would fool no-one (if indeed it fooled anyone in the 1950s, when it was broadcast). Indeed, many journalists find it difficult to tell fact from fiction when it comes to new media, which in the popular press has lived up to the recently-deceased Arthur C Clarke's maxim that technology will become indistinguishable from magic.
The Times features a new Facebook application which will allow friends to pinpoint one another's position using mobile phone masts and wi-fi... this fooled a few, and we could well believe it, considering that the iPhone and a GPS-activated telephone can do much the same. UPDATE: This one's true: The Telegraph thought it was a joke too!
The Sun goes for Google Earth, where it "reveals" a UFO previously undetected in the Bristol Channel.
An altogether more spectacular use of technology is used by the BBC and Daily Telegraph, who publish a story and video showing how a BBC wildlife crew have discovered flying penguins. The video, which you can watch here, has former Python star Terry Jones look on in wonder as the birds flock overhead, heading for the Amazon rainforest's sunnier climes. It's a really well done piece of self-parody, funny and quite beautiful at the same time.
