Several years ago, when I lived in the UK, I received the kind of telephone call that gladdens the foreign correspondent’s heart.

            “Arky,” the editor of a leading US newspaper instructed, “I want you to follow up on the ‘Llandudno Triangle’. It’s a place in Wales where dozens of Welshmen have disappeared in recent years.”

            Excitedly, I jotted down the details, all the time racking my fevered brain trying to comprehend how I could have missed such a story, which this editor had so clearly spotted from over 4,000 miles away.

Finally, I asked, “where are you getting all these details from?” He named a respected British journal, The New Scientist. A thought flickered through my mind. “what is the date of the issue?” “April 1”, he answered. “ Sorry to disappoint you mate,” I chuckled, “but that’s an April Fool issue-there’s no ‘LLandudno Triangle’.”

            “No reputable magazine would publish a gag like that,” he spluttered and with an oath, he hung up.

            If there’s one day of the year that traditional British reserve is thrown to the wind, it’s on April 1. The country goes gaga over April Fool gags. Many are so clever, so artfully designed, that they take in large segments of the population. The bigger and more powerful the communications medium, the more likely it is to have a carefully plotted gag up its sleeve.

            No one really knows why April 1 is a day for pranks. One theory is that it is of Indian origin. Another blames April Fool on an early Roman fete, the Feast of the Fools, during which the Romans discredited their arch rivals, the druids. Some historians believe that April foolery dates back to 1564, when the reformed calendar was adopted in France. Anyone who resisted switching New Year’s Day from April 1 to January 1 was considered to be a fool.

            The Indians, Romans or French may have started it, but it’s today’s Britons who carry it on to ludicrous and humourous heights.

            The foolery usually starts early over BBC radio and the independent stations. Various April 1 listeners have, over the years, awakened to be told that the white cliffs of Dover were turning green; that a scientific search was underway  to find the iceberg which sank the Titanic; that Big Ben’s clock dial was going to become digital; and that a new European Common Market directive would make it mandatory for all Britons to wear special, non-slip shoes when the temperature fell below freezing.

            In 1979, one station came out with elaborate details about “Operation Parallax”, an alleged government scheme to cancel the next two Thursday, because Britain had lost a total of two days setting its clocks backwards and forwards since World War II. Telephone calls flooded the station. Among the callers were employers asking whether they would have to pay their workers for the cancelled days.

            Another time, a BBC producer and his friends went into a studio, switched on the microphones and proceeded to kick over every chair and  music stand in sight. The resulting tape-recording was presented on April 1 as a modern music concert. At least one critic reviewed it seriously.

            The most famous TV gag was concocted by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby in 1957. Dimbleby normally covered royal ceremonial events such as coronations, weddings and the opening of Parliament. He was an inviolate, beloved symbol of absolute trust in the eyes of  British viewers. Which made all his Panorama news-feature programme, when he commented on the seasonal “spaghetti harvest” in Switzerland.

            The film clips showed trees dripping with strips of white spaghetti, Dimbleby explaining in his usual hushed, confidential tone, “spaghetti cultivation here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the dame scale of the Italian industry. Many of you, I am sure, will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po Valley. For the Swiss, however, it is a family affair.”

            Happy Swiss villagers were shown carrying great baskets of newly-har-vested pasta to be dried in the sun. Ladies in folk dress were seen trimming the spaghetti out of the trees.

            Again, the switchboards lit up, some of the callers asking how they could grow spaghetti in their own gardens. The BBC’s tongue-in-cheek answer: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce; keep it on the window sill in the sun, and hope for the best.”

            Another establishment figure, astronomer Patrick Moore, had Britons jumping on April 1,  He told BBC listeners that at 9:45 on the morning of April 1, Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter, Producing a slight gravitational pull which would make everyone feel lighter. He urged them to jump at precisely 9:47 am, indicating that they would stay aloft longer than usual.

            By 9:48 am the switchboard was ablaze again with delighted callers saying that they had all experienced the floating sensation when they jumped on schedule. One woman said her entire coffee klatch of 11 people ha floated around the room. A man complained he had hit his head on the ceiling.

            London’s press is particularly April Foolish. An elaborate hoax was concocted by the staid and conservative Guardian. It created a four-pages special section about an imaginary island nation called San Seriffe. (San seriffe is a printing term for a type-face which lacks elaborate ornamentation.) Every proper noun in the story was a printing term. The map showed the country’s two islands, Lower Caisse and Upper Caisse. The capital city was Bodoni. The political leader was a General Pica who had studied his way through the Bodoni Machinegun Academy. The feature was filled with faked photographs of offshore oil rigs and luxurious beaches, beckoning to the tourist trade.

            Several travel agents later called the paper for information. They wanted to send charter flights full of passengers to the island.

            Even the advertisers got into this April Fool act. Texaco announced a contest in which the first prize was a two-week trip to San Seriffe’s Coco Banana Beach. The small print advised careful readers that the contest ended March 31, the day before the ad appeared. 

            And so, all Britain awaits April 1, 1993 with anticipation, wondering which gag the gullible will fall for next. And even if I never did get to write up the “Llandudno Triangle”. I have managed to turn April Fool’s Day into an assignment after all.