Media take annual chance to demonstrate their hilarity with 1 April stories that are just too far-fetched to be true – or are they?
Guardian readers taking off their Guardian Goggles – the revolutionary web-connected glasses the paper claimed to have produced to immerse users in its journalism – to flick through rival newspapers or surf the web on Monday found themselves assailed by April fools on all sides.
The Daily Mirror reported on Virgin's new glass-bottomed plane; the Telegraph claimed the government was appointing a "lights tsar" to get Britons switching their lights off and saving electricity; and the Sun claimed Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood went camping over the chilly Easter weekend to prepare themselves for Glastonbury.
But some were harder to spot. Many thought the Times story about Nasa planning "a $2.6bn robotic mission to catch an asteroid in a giant bag and tow it to the moon" was a spoof. It wasn't. Instead its enjoyably convoluted tale about a set of newly discovered papers written by Captain Jasper Speedicut – a Victorian officer who "somehow, against all plausibility, fought in all the major expeditions of the period" – was the April fool.
The Independent's memorable headline "Freddie Mercury 'smuggled Princess Diana into a gay club dressed as a man'" fooled many into thinking it was bogus, while the Daily Mail's exclusive about Asda's 50 Shades of Grey toilet paper ("each 'shade' has been named after lead character Christian Grey's traits, from 'enigmatic' to 'obsessive'") was too convincing for one reader, who left this appalled comment on the paper's website: "This is plain wrong. Toilet-related activities and matters of the bedroom should not be associated!"
Metro published an amusing and very postmodern blog featuring fake April fools from the BBC (Nasa's Curiosity rover quits Twitter after abuse from trolls'), Facebook (introducing a $1.99 paywall with the convincingly cuddly name the Facebook Friend Fence), Buzzfeed ("27 reasons why this writer is slowly dying on the inside" – a headline that may suggest the Metro piece was even more self-referential than it first seemed), and even the Guardian.
For men seeking that must-have fashion item for the moment when spring finally arrives – surely just a few months away now – Boden was proud to present the Marylebone Man-Skirt. "Trousers made sense when men rode horses, ploughed fields and trawled for fish," the clothing company explained. "But now that so many of us are sat in front of a computer monitor all day the man-skirt is a smart choice." Eager to have its cake and eat it, the company added that "we won't rule out producing a real one should demand dictate it".
Among the most frighteningly convincing April fools was that by Greek news website Enet English, which reported that the dreaded troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund were asking Greece to abandon its unique alphabet and embrace Latin script as a "strong confidence-building gesture that could help the state's privatisation programme by making it easier for investors to find their way around the country".
The media was awash with false information. Radio 4's Today programme announced that smartphone-readable barcodes would replace numbers on the sides of trains; Google launched Google Nose, which produces the smell of whatever you type into the search engine (just "bring your nose as close as you can to the screen and press enter"); and Twitter revealed it was going to start charging tweeters to use vowels.
Anyone failing to take precautionary note of the date would be forgiven for believing that Boris Johnson was about to stand for David Miliband's South Shields seat (Channel 4 News), a Qatari-funded helter-skelter called the Shlide was about to be fitted to the Shard (Huffington Post), Battersea Dogs and Cats Home was training four-legged friends in housework and gardening to make them more likely to find a home, or even that work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith had claimed he could live on £53 a week. Oh, wait a minute …
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