Text 5 April Fools' Day

The first of April is known as April Fool's Day or All Fool's Day. It is the day of practical jokes and any person can become a victim of traditional tricks of the undone shoelace or a crooked tie or a false invitation to a party. No one really knows when this custom began but it has been kept for hundreds of years.

The First of April, some do say

Is set apart for All Fools Day;

But why the people call it so,

Not I, nor they themselves do know.

April Fool jokes usually involve persuading someone to do something silly, like looking for hen's teeth, striped paint, a long weight, a left-handed screwdriver or some other non-existent thing. However, you can only play April Fools on people before midday – at midday the fun must stop or the trickster is told:

'April Fool's Day is past and gone,

Your 're the fool and I am none.'

On this day of national good humour, the television service joins in the fun. One of the great April Fool jokes took place on April 1st, 1957. The BBC TV programme ‘Panorama’ did a documentary on 'spaghetti farmers' growing 'spaghetti trees.' The hoax Panorama programme featured a family from Switzerland carrying out their annual spaghetti harvest. It showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry. The joke was an enormous success. Hundreds of people believed there was such thing as spaghetti trees. Soon after the broadcast ended, the BBC began to receive hundreds of calls from puzzled viewers.