Fools’ Gold

‘YOU’VE got to hand it to the Daily Mail – their writers are terrific wags.

April Fool! She’s still dead really!

‘Was it a royal joke? You bet!’ they reveal on page 31.

‘It was the question royal-watchers everywhere were asking yesterday,’ the paper continues.

But what is the joke of which they speak? Surely not the tale of Wills and the ‘very middle-class beauty’ that is featured so prominently at the front of the paper?

No, of course not. They are talking about their own rib-tickling April Fool article, in which a Queen look-alike popped into the bookies for a flutter on the Grand National.

So convincing was this elaborate hoax that ‘many of her loyal subjects’ failed to spot it for the chucklesome diversion that it was.

‘But others worked out that the name of the servant – Sir High Grenoble [stop it, you’re killing us!] – might be related to St Hugh of Grenoble, patron saint of All Fools.

‘And some spotted that Mr Otto Breeching [nurse, the screens!] – the Austrian tourist who allegedly snapped the Queen at William Hill’s in Windsor – is an anagram of ‘bet on the corgi’.’

And some readers, of course, will have noticed that if you cut up all the words in the article and rearrange them, they explain how there is an immigration time bomb that is threatening to blow the entire British property market to pieces, leaving millions of taxpayers in negative equity.

Although other readers will of course have realised that the same effect could be achieved by leaving all the other articles exactly as they were.’

Posted: 2nd, April 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink