April Fools' Day Newspaper Stories

[sp1814]

Traditionally, UK papers have published fake stories on April Fools' Day.

Has anyone found any yet?

[jno]

the Mail ran a story about Biggles being a real person. I thought it had to be a spoof, but it was dated March 31.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2302020/Cripes-Biggles-real-Adventurer-hero-named-Great-War-airman.html

It appears however that it was a prank by a news agency and the Mail fell for it, according to the Telegraph round-up.

[emmie]

still makes me laugh, the name of the source gives it away, helps if you can do anagrams quickly. x


http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/News/Question1230283.html

[jno]

Metro ran an excellent round-up

http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/01/april-fools-day-2013-a-round-up-of-the-best-jokes-and-hoaxes-3566543/

The trick is that it too was a hoax; none of the spoofs actually appeared

[DaisyNonna]

Telegraph Business 'lights tsar'.

[emmie]

daisy, Gromits finest hour x lol

[FredPuli43]

Nice Matin ran a full page piece on beach erosion at Juan-les-Pins. According to the story, the sandy beach was to be loaded with 300,000 tonnes of pebbles, imported from Normandy in 8,000 lorries. The work was to start in 2015. This was necessary because all other experiments by the town hall had failed to stop the loss of sand. The beach would thereafter be a pebble beach and not a sandy one.

What made this story credible was a) it is true that the beach at Juan,like others on this coast, does have tonnes of sand added to it, from time to time b) this is just the kind of scheme that the town hall would dream up

Today's paper gleefully announced that the hoax story had resulted in a lot of correspondence from concerned Antibois and Juanais (Antibes has the town hall responsible for Juan)