April Fool Round-Up

It was the most blatant April Fool of the lot, right down to the glaringly fictitious name on the by-line, but the Mail On Sunday (MoS) has, if the comments are to be believed, managed to fool some of the people enough of the time, which is the whole modus operandi of the Dacre press in a nutshell. It should have been obvious when the author was “Pru Cremier” (Geddit?!? No. You’re fired – Ed.).

Over at the Super Soaraway Sunday Steamer, Rupe’s downmarket troops tried a slightly (but only slightly) more subtle approach, using real hacks as they breathlessly told “James Bond and the Queen to open The Olympic Games”, along with the photo caption “One would like you to open the Olympics”. For trivia lovers, the name of the operation, “The Arrival” might sound familiar.

That’s because “Arrival” is the first episode of the cult classic TV series The Prisoner. Nice touch from the Murdoch faithful, but the photo of a Boeing Chinook overflying Tower Bridge with the caption “Bond calmly finishes his Earl Grey and bids the Queen goodbye before scrambling aboard a waiting chopper” is one leg-pull too many. As Sir Sean nearly said, I think we got the point.

A more upmarket April Fool was provided at Telegraph Blogs by pianist Stephen Hough, who talks of inserting a metal comb into the top register of the piano keyboard to get a fictional sound effect (“ringing overtones”) before citing musical scholar Eiji Ouk (geddit?!?) and an orchestra called the Jafoul Philharmonic in Indonesia. Jakarta? No, we went by plane.

But the real cracker comes from the Observer, with the supposed news that Shaun Ryder, formerly of the Happy Mondays, is to become a Government advisor. “Cameron asks Shaun Ryder to advise on class and help to detox Tories” is the headline, along with a T-shirt campaign called “We are all eating this together” to banish the memories of Pastygate.

The line about getting Young Dave to visit a chippy in Salford is particularly good: “Dave needs to be seen tucking into chips and gravy. Everyone knows you can't get decent gravy down south, so that will get him brownie points in the north”. And the idea that “Maybe I'll take him to see the Stone Roses as well, so he'll show he's down with the man on the street” is just excellent.

And from the blogosphere there has to be a mention for the all too realistic Evening Standard send-up by Adam Bienkov at The Scoop. Below a “Hot topics” line that contains only Boris Johnson (not that they’re biased) is “Boris to bring back the ‘slammers’”, telling of a new initiative to bring back slam door trains to allow “hop on, hop off” rail travel. Problem is, Bozza has done dafter things already.

Have a relaxing First of April.