April fools used to make us laugh. Then came fake news

By Matthew Sweet

What’s the April fool etiquette in an age of fake news? Is pranking irresponsible, given the amount of conspiracist backwash about Bill Gates’s plan to kneecap Lady Liberty and inject us all with nanoparticles? Perhaps we will have more appetite for good-natured deception this year, now the American president is no longer producing 21 false claims a day. Or maybe gags and hoaxes will stay on our list of temporarily relinquished pleasures, like dance floors and tables for ten and big rooms full of applauding strangers.

The best pranks have an unexpected afterlife. In 1983, the producer of “Doctor Who” at the BBC tried to weed out leaks in his team by listing a script called “The Doctor’s Wife” on the office noticeboard – a fake episode which was turned into a real one by his successor, 27 years later. The Swiss tourism board released a video in 2009 about the Felsenputzer, cleaners employed to scrub the Alps, that became so popular a cable-car company began offering real courses in mountain-cleaning. In 1934, a gynaecologist called Robert Wilson stuck a carved wooden head onto a Woolworth’s plastic toy submarine, popped it into Loch Ness and took a photograph that generated a mythology now worth about £41m a year to the Scottish economy.