Every day is April Fools’ Day

Their’s never been that much of a challenge in trying to fool somebody.

For example, did you think that the above glaring grammatical error was accidental? You see, the real skill lies in tricking people with style, where the prank walks that very fine line between the absurd and the probable, forcing us to accept our gullibility in the face of a capricious universe. A great April Fools prank exposes our rational minds to the absurdities of nature. A bad one simply confirms what we already know: that people make mistakes and that some forces in the world are utterly predictable. 

When BBC News fell for Blenheim Palace’s April Fool this week (and yes, apparently, palaces now have a “sense of humour”), the fault lay not with the BBC but with the pranksters at Blenheim. After all, is it really that inconceivable that 200 people might have once gathered at Woodstock, Oxfordshire in 1769, two hundred years before the more famous festival? Was it that hard to believe that the concert (who knew that people liked to have fun back then) included a performance by “a singer by the name of Vincent Furnier”? What deep background would you need to know to recognise this as an obvious joke? Would you even know that Blenheim is next to a town called Woodstock? (I didn’t.) That Alice Cooper’s real name is Vincent Furnier? (Nope. News to me!) Does anybody even have enough time in their day to connect all these irrelevancies together, to save themselves the embarrassment of being ridiculed by a stately home?

And ask it quietly: is any of that even remotely funny?

But what about the story about the golden toilet of Blenheim that has also been in the headlines? A man has pleaded guilty to stealing an 18-carat loo which was valued at £4.8 million. Are you so gullible to believe somebody would make a toilet out of gold and that it could be valued at nearly five million quid?

Yet, apparently, that story is true, which says a lot about a world that has moved on since April Fools became established at some point in our collective past.

The origins of All Fools’ Day seem to stretch back almost into our prehistory. Some think its origins lie in the Bible, a book famous for its apple pie beds and rubber spiders, while others think it’s linked more fundamentally with our human nature, having some deep anthropological meaning linked to our need for revelry as we emerge from the winter and before we get into the hard work of the Spring and Summer.

Either way, the tradition predates the postmodern world where it does look increasingly anachronistic. We are no longer a serious people who need permission to play pranks, just as we no longer need Lenny Henry’s consent to be funny in the name of Comic Relief. We live in a frivolous age where every day we are satirists, comedians, meme creators, YouTube stars, and TikTokers. We are no longer the generation of our parents or grandparents, where adulthood was synonymous with pinstripes, waistcoats, and a narrow orthodoxy of tastes, fashions, and attitudes. Forget career statesmen and trade unionists, we are now electing jokers to high positions. A comedian became president of Ukraine; a clown led Italy until 2021; an insult comic was President of the United States until 2020. Even here in the UK, a minor PG Wodehouse comic creation took power and might yet take power again. Even with Rishi Sunak in office, Downing Street still wants to be seen to be fun. This week they pranked people who thought they were going to be talking to a government financial advisor, only to find themselves on a Zoom call with the Prime Minister. Hilarious!

So how is April Fools’ Day relevant when every day offers a challenge to distinguish the real from the clickbait? How is the “news” that Swiss police are rolling out a squad of “Drogenspürhuhn” or drug-sniffing chickens any different to the news from the beginning of the year that scientists have figured out a way to train bees to sniff out bombs?

On Monday, Jeremy Vine posted a video to Twitter of him riding his bike through London, watched by a drone which is then taken out by a bird. How can we be sure it was a prank rather than just another video of a drone being taken out by a bird or a chimpanzee or even a toddler juiced up on some trendy influencer drink? Which bit of it doesn’t seem reasonable? Which bit makes us slap our foreheads and cry “How could I be so gullible?” Is it the bit that had Vine cycling through London tracked by a drone? It wasn’t that hard to believe given he seems to have more cameras attached to his person than a traffic island.

The ITV show Good Morning, meanwhile, wasted viewers’ time with a “prank” in which Dermot O’Leary “accidentally” knocked over a “priceless vase” (I’m using up my year’s supply of inverted commas in this article), whilst GMTV did the same involving a string of “pearls” that once “belonged” to Marilyn Monroe. 

Neither was so much a prank as a pastiche of popular memes; a brazen attempt to artificially create YouTube moments utterly devoid of the charm or true shock value that makes true YouTube moments. 

Meanwhile, the media are reporting that the police in the UK will not be asked to arrest people simply if they smell. It’s the best April Fools gag there’s been this year: just stepping a foot or two across the line of the believable while also being so ridiculous that it can’t actually be true. 

But hang on! April the first has been and gone? So either we’re the fools for carrying on or the story is true, which, of course, it is, because this is where we are right now, with a government so desperate to divide us that they are genuinely raising the possibility that rough sleeping will be criminalised. What next? Will catching e-coli by ingesting polluted water now carry a mandatory jail sentence? Missing an appointment because of the failure of our public transport network will carry a fine? Why not simply outlaw voting for anybody other than the Tory party?

To put this into context: OpenAI has decided not to make its voice cloning technology available during this election year, saying they want to make an “informed” decision about the rollout. When a company behind AI admits to reservations about its capacity to fool people, maybe fooling has to be taken more seriously. We live in a time of such malicious deception, especially funded by foreign actors, that perhaps it’s time for the media to stop playing these silly games every year. We’re already dealing with so much fake news that it’s not the time to be indulging in even more. 

Just a couple of weeks ago, Liz Truss was widely reported to have said “I was brought down by the left-wing economic establishment”, even though she didn’t. That did sound like something she would say – she has said much dumber things – and to some people that was enough. But the danger is that justified criticism of Truss is diluted by the unjustified criticism. And there is so much that sounds ridiculous in the news but should be condemned. 

Just this week, Gizmodo reported on the technology behind Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” stores, whereby AI is used to identify what shoppers carry out of the shop, before billing them. “Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labelling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.”

Or how about the story that a ticket to tour Balmoral costs £100 but it’s £150 if you want afternoon tea? Is that the world’s most expensive afternoon tea? Well, no. It’s £75 for Afternoon Tea at the Ritz, though a bargain at £53 for a child…

Who needs a single day of April Fools when we have a whole year crammed with these blithering idiots?

@DavidWaywell

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