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Non-Fiction
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| April Fools' Day | |
| By Josie | ||||
| 29 March 2008 | ||||
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April fools’ day April Fools’ Day, or All Fools Day will be with us on Tuesday next. Have you planned any hoaxes? Others may be planning something for you, especially children and teenagers. Be ready for them. Have they ever done it already? It happened to us when our daughter was a teenager, and before the invention of mobile phones. We were fast asleep when the telephone rang at 4 am, and, eventually, finding that the caller was persistent, we thought it must be something urgent. Imagine our surprise when the voice who called “April Fool” was our teenage daughter who had taken herself out of bed and in her dressing gown had wandered down the road to the telephone box just to play a prank on us. We have all had some strange tricks played on us all at one time or another. In 1980 the BBC announced that it had been decided that the clock faces on our friend Big Ben were to be changed. It was being replaced by digital images, to keep up with modern technology. Imagine the number of telephone calls that came to the BBC, protesting about such a dreadful thing. In 1957 Richard Dimbleby, quite seriously, announced on television that the spaghetti crop in Switzerland was unusually large because of the mild winter and the absence of the spaghetti weevil. People were seen picking spaghetti from trees. Nowadays, of course, people would laugh, but in those days, spaghetti was something quite new in Britain, and therefore believable. In 1962, on Swedish television, the announcer told his viewers that if they wished to change their one channel of television in black and white, into colour, they had to pull a nylon stocking over the tv set. Because it was explained so well, with a straight face, man people were taken in and tried it. In fact colour television didn’t start in Sweden until 1970. There have been many things done over the course of history which might be described as an April Fools’ Trick – but in fact it wasn’t. We’ll never forget when Michael Fish, our weatherman, came onto television at lunch-time. He told us that a lady had phoned him and asked if there was a hurricane on its way, and, grinning, he said “Well, don’t worry if you’re watching. There isn’t.” Then what about poor Charlotte Green, one of our newscasters, a couple of days ago. She burst into giggles when she was trying to read an orbituary on the Today programme recently. She is known for her steadfast composure. If you haven’t heard of it, here is the story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/28/bbc.radio These weren’t April Fool pranks, but really happened. I used to read for shorthand examinations, and prayed that there would be nothing funny in the script I had to read, because I, too, would have burst into giggles. I always went to the exam room early to read through the script a few times. I had to read at exactly the right speed for the examination, whether it was 60 or 160 words per minute. It had to be correct to the very second on the quarter of a minute. Oh dear – such fun. I'm hoping that nothing too bad happens to you on April Fools' Day, but perhaps we might be fooled by a peaceful day in the poetry section. (Ooooh! Say no more!)
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