Oh, we have a laugh, don’t we? April Fool and all that. Hyuk hyuk hyuk. The day when you can’t believe anything you read in the papers!
Take, for example, this story in the Express: SALT BANNED IN CHIP SHOPS. I mean, we’re not really meant to believe it, are we? Come off it. Classic April Fool japery, and very well executed – the casual observer could be lulled into thinking that salt really was being banned! The SALT BANNED headline and the intro “Salt shakers are being removed” make it appear to be a genuine story – but it has all the hallmarks of an April Fool spoof.
Props to the Express, though, for including quotes from the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Monmouth MP David Davies to make the nonsense appear more believable. But really! They’d certainly check the facts before lending their respected voices to a story that isn’t all it seems. So, well done to them for playing along in the spirit of 1 April.
Oh.
The date on that “salt banned” story appears to be 31 March, not 1 April. And it seems that it was put out there as a real story claiming SALT IS BANNED, despite the salt not being “banned” at all, but merely tucked away behind the counter.
I suppose if that’s a ban, you could say cigarettes are BANNED because they’re behind the counter: you know, BANNED in the sense of being “available to customers”. That kind of BANNED. The same kind of BANNED that cars are thanks to bonkers Brussels beaurocrats, as reported in Tuesday’s Daily Express. When the headline says “Cars face ban from all cities . . . another plan forced on us by the crazy EU”, that encapsulates a story in which no one is demanding that cars be banned from any city (let alone all) quite neatly.
If you’ve tried scouring through the tabloids’ websites this morning, thinking to yourself “Which one’s the April Fool?” I don’t blame you if you’ve given up in the end. Is it the boy who assaulted someone with a marshmallow? The travelator on the golf course? The poodles dressed as koi carp and a panda? How are we supposed to tell the difference?
April Fool spoofs work because of a level of trust in the other 364 days of the year; if you’re largely expecting what’s presented to you to be entirely accurate, you could easily be fooled by a plausible enough tale this morning. If you get told about bans that aren’t bans on a fairly regular basis, you might look at the April Fool stories and think: Oh well, it’s no less ridiculous than what we had the other day.
It’s all coming to an end, this annual silliness, for a few reasons. First, because readers can quickly seek out information to debunk the stories. Second, because we’re all becoming even more healthily sceptical about what we read in the papers than we ever were. And last, because the EU has BANNED April Fool stories for reasons of health and safety. You couldn’t make it up . . .
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