April Fools’ day, by Avril de Poisson

Was April Fools’ Day ever really fun? I only ask because yesterday was so emphatically self-serving and smug that I feel like I need to towel myself off after consuming the British media all day long. Was there a newspaper or website that didn’t offer its consumers a ‘prank’ story of such utter banality that it made you want to weep blood?

So we had Carla Bruni to become style advisor to Great Britain, Nicholas Sarkozy having surgery to make him as tall as his wife, the face of Big Ben being replaced with a digital display and weight-loss cream that had to be used while wearing special socks.

And then added to that steaming heap, you had the huge companies that think that displaying some humour – and I use the word loosely – will flog more of their awful shit. Guinness offering a backwards pint which was all froth, with a head of stout (‘For One Day Only’, just in case you didn’t get it). BMW had a car that electrified dogs that pissed on them (one that electrocuted the herd of douchenozzles that drive ‘beemers’ would be more to my liking) and Google offering a web application that can predict the future. Give me a break. The normally sainted YouTube stole someone else’s joke (sorry, internet meme) and made all their front page vids link to a Rick Astley clip. Kill me now.

And the BBC offered us flying penguins. Look, BBC, I’m not that stupid. I know penguins don’t fly. So your joke doesn’t work. And if you think it does work, on lots of people who aren’t me, then you should be slapped for being so patronising. With all your resources, couldn’t you have put some real thought into it? Although someone there managed to put together a smart piece on stories in the news that sound like April Fools’ stories but actually weren’t, including a smoking turtle, pay-per-view cremations, and tattoos for the teeth, which provided a far more lucid and ironic commentary on the world we live in than flying penguins and Gordon Ramsay forswearing swearing.

The whole April Fools’ thing has just become a lazy shorthand for having a sense of humour, like those ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!’ signs by peoples' desks that thankfully I never see anymore.

There probably was a golden age of April Fools’ jokes: The Guardian’s supplement on the island of San Serriffe was clever and convincing. When the BBC did its Spaghetti Harvest thing, that fooled lots of people. But yesterday had Alistair Darling playing a lottery scratchcard in a newsagent, Daniel Craig saying that James Bond should be bisexual, and the US scrapping the dollar and joining the euro. Don’t any of these highly-paid media professionals credit us with a scintilla of intelligence? It would appear not.

As it happens, I do remember once when I had fun with an April Fools’ joke. I used to live on a small island about an hour’s boat commute from Hong Kong. The island was, because of the difficulty of getting there, a haven for hippies and artists and writers, who revelled in its relative isolation (and the absence of police). There were a lot of big infrastructure problems going on in Hong Kong at the time – airports, bridges and so on -- and my flatmate came up with the idea of persuading people that the MTR (the underground system) was going to extend its lines out to the Outlying Islands. So he had incredibly convincing posters made (he worked for an ad agency), in full colour, in two languages, with maps and perfect logos, explaining that construction was about to start imminently.

Late at night, after the last ferry had come in, we pasted up the posters outside the ferry terminal, not just on our island, but on all the other Outlying Islands’ ferry terminals. We got up early the next morning to watch the three or four thousand deeply-isolationist reluctant stoner commuters digest the bad news, that paradise was ending, as they shuffled to the ferry. It was chaos. The joke was simple, believable, and beautifully executed. Everyone fell for it. There were questions in the Legislative Council. Later that day, it made the TV news, and, we heard afterwards, had been mentioned in British newspapers. In their roundup of all the wacky April Fools’ pranks from around the world. Which kind of killed it for me.

Anyone got any better stories? Journalists need not apply.