Graeme Whitfield
IT is that magical time of the year, and with just two days to go, you can see the excitement on children’s faces and positively feel the anticipation in the air.
Yes, it is almost April Fool’s Day, the day when silliness takes over for a few hours and people (in theory) take themselves a little bit less seriously for one single bleedin’ day of the year. (I’ll come back to the ‘in theory’ bit later).
I am possibly biased in my love for April Fools’ Day as I am an April Fool. Born on April 1 – this year I think I’ll be 793, based on how I currently feel – I used to find that tag annoying. Now I positively embrace it. Of course I’m an April Fool! In fact, I am a fool pretty much all year round.
There’s a fine tradition of April Fools in my industry, of course, from a famous Panorama programme about spaghetti trees to an elaborate Guardian pull-out supplement about a mythical island called San Seriffe.
I have been involved in a few Journal April Fools myself, including a plan to run Metros through the Victoria Tunnel which involved “narrow gauge railways similar to those seen in many parts of the country that are popular with tourists and railway enthusiasts”.
My colleagues and I were very taken with an idea one of us had to pretend the Chronicle and Journal’s old offices on Groat Market were going to be turned into a Greggs-themed hotel, but we never quite managed to pull it off.
Each April 1, we would get phone calls from people who had read our stories and felt the need to question our news gathering abilities. When we pointed out that it was April 1, most would chuckle and accept that they had been hoodwinked but there was also some who would get very huffy and slam the phone down. Not everyone likes being fooled.
Now the equivalent of the huffy phone slam is people who take to social media and scream “FAKE NEWS!” in capital letters. It’s actively damaging to our brands, so we haven’t done an April Fool in a few years. It’s a bit of a shame but such is life.
And then fake news is very much a thing. This week the Conservatives put out a slightly ludicrous video saying that London was the crime capital of the world that included footage from an incident in New
York. Labour is little better, last year running a series of ludicrous attack ads including one that said “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”
You can probably expect a lot more of this stuff as we stumble towards the General Election. The people involved know they’re lying but do it anyway, presumably because it works. After all, the UK elected one of its most promiment liars as Prime Minister last time round, so why not?
Of course there is a difference between this stuff and the April Fools I was so fond of. The latter were witty and frivolous, but campaign lies are generally just nasty and demean everyone involved.
Maybe we should enjoy the silliness on Monday and then make sure we aren’t taken for fools any longer.