San Serriffe may have been what Wainwright calls it, ‘the most successful April Fool in newspaper history’; but, as he acknowledges, the 1 April feature that caused most trouble appeared in the Times in 1972, when the paper’s Saturday Review marked the centenary of the travel agency Thomas Cook.
In a wicked moment, [John] Carter [the Times’s travel correspondent] typed out an addition to the copy which offered 1,000 places on a special centenary tour of the world ‘at 1872 prices’.
Thousands of readers applied. Carter was sacked, though he was reinstated after convincing the paper’s top brass that he had never meant the addition to be printed — it was intended as an in-house joke.
What Wainwright nicely terms ‘April Fool fatigue’ has set in — to the extent that perfectly accurate news items published on 1 April are denounced as hoaxes. He covers them in a chapter headed ‘Weird but true’ — for example, ‘the world’s first flying moth-collecting machine’ (1993) and ‘a chicken-powered nuclear bomb’ (2004). In 2006 data protection experts suspected a fool when an online bulletin board story on 1 April lavished praise on a European Parliament member called Boogerd-Quaak. She is, Wainwright reports, ‘entirely real and a doughty campaigner for civil liberties from the Netherlands’. Well, I’ll be …
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