In Britain, as in many other countries, there is a special day in the year when people play practical jokes on each other and when the media invents hoax news stories. This day is called April Fools’ Day, and takes place on 1st April.
Some April Fools’ Day hoaxes have been very easy to spot. Examples include a television report about a dinosaur in a London park, and a supermarket advertisement for ‘whistling carrots’. The supermarket advert said that when people cooked the carrots, they would start making a whistling sound as soon as they were ready to eat!
Even completely ridiculous hoaxes can fool people, however. One year, when the BBC said the government was going to ‘modernise’ London’s famous Big Ben clock by making it digital, lots of gullible people phoned the BBC to say they didn’t agree with the idea. The same thing happened a few years later when the BBC invented a story about Britain suddenly having a new national anthem, with all the words in German!
One of the most famous April Fools’ Day hoaxes was a BBC television programme in 1957 about ‘spaghetti trees’ in Switzerland. In the 1950s, most British people weren’t familiar with ‘foreign’ food such as pasta, so the programme made thousands of people think that spaghetti really did grow on trees.
In the United States, April Fools’ Day hoaxes include a 1998 advert by Burger King for a special ‘left-handed’ hamburger. The advert said that when a left-handed person bit into the burger, any sauce that dripped out would always fall to the right, away from their hand. Anyone who fell for that one must have felt quite embarrassed, but perhaps less embarrassed than the people in Sweden who put stockings on their televisions on 1st April 1962. Why did they do that? Because all Swedish televisions were black and white at the time, but an ‘expert’ had just appeared on a popular programme to say people could immediately see everything in colour if they put a nylon stocking over their sets!
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