Today is 1 April, also known as ‘April Fools Day’.

When I was about six, and staying with my dad at the house of some friends of his in Norwich, he and I bought a big ball of string, tied one end around the knocker on their front door, unravelled it until we were hidden behind a fence, and tugged a few times. Nothing. Then the door opened – inwards – and my dad’s friend Joan ran her gaze along the suddenly very thick-seeming, bleached-white yarn until it reached our protruding hands and heads. ‘April fools!’, she said.

This was my inauspicious introduction to a tradition that has appealed to me ever since. The bar is quite high for an April Fools’ Day jape, because everyone is primed to expect one: something must be foolish and believable and lucky all at once if it is to slip through the net and land in someone’s lap unbidden. What fun. I didn’t question where the custom came from until much later, though, because even curious minds can incuriously accept circumstance.

April Fools’ Day isn’t as old as you might think. Some historians believe it might originate in late sixteenth-century France, after the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar, which moved New Years’ Day from 25 March (or otherwise Easter or 1 March in some parts of Europe) to 1 January. Country folk may have caught on to the change a little later than others, so the theory goes, and therefore have seemed like ‘April fools’ (or, at least nearly-April fools). This seems a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it? John Aubrey (1686) mentions ‘Fooles holy day’, and suggests it originated in Germany. Nobody really knows. In any case, soon enough it became a Thing in this country too. In 1698, perhaps the earliest recorded April Fools’ Day prank on these shores saw crowds flock to the Tower of London to witness the annual washing of the lions. They brought invitations bearing wax seals, and presumably then went home disappointed. By the middle of the eighteenth century, April Fools’ Day shenanigans had become widespread, though the tradition principally concerned adults trying to trick one another into performing ridiculous tasks. In A Dictionary of English Folklore (2000), Steve Roud and Jacqueline Simpson give examples such as ‘seeking […] pigeon’s milk or a biography of Eve’s mother.’

In the 1800s, it was being asserted confidently in Notes & Queries that, at least in England, April Fools’ Day pranks only occur in the mornings, and this has stuck ever since. Presumably the motivation was to prevent the consumption of alcohol from upping the ante. In Scotland, on the other hand, the prankery traditionally went on for two days. By early Victorian times, however, much of this calendar-bound tomfoolery had abated almost everywhere, or at least had been confined largely to the working classes, where it could be ignored as a going concern by the sorts of people who wrote things down. The English folklore collectors of the ensuing fifty or so years – mainly rural gentlemen in dog-collars and ladies in posh hats, assuaging their ennui by collecting common stories and customs before many of them vanished – barely mentioned April Fools’ Day, and when they did it was usually in the context of children’s lore, as a sort of tame counterpart to Mischief Night. (If you don’t know what that is, good for you.) In their excellent recent book Folklore: A Journey Through Past and Present (2025), Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook quote a 1914 article in the Dundee Courier. The custom had ‘not fallen completely into abeyance’, it stated, but had ‘been shorn of much of its glory by the stress of modern life.’ The sudden intervention of near-global modern warfare probably didn’t help either.

Enter mass media, eventually. In 1957, the first year in which most British households had a telly, BBC’s Panorama provided a stern documentary on the harvesting of spaghetti in Switzerland, presented plummily by Richard Dimbleby. The BBC received hundreds of calls, some callers asking where they might procure their own spaghetti trees. Such pranks proliferated, as newspapers and broadcasters vied to outdo one another by beclowning their audiences with ever-more ludicrous hoaxes. In 1962, Sveriges Television told viewers of Sweden’s only TV station that their programmes could be seen in glorious technicolour with the aid of a nylon stocking stretched across the screen. In 1976, Patrick Moore informed listeners of The Sky at Night that a unique planetary alignment at 9.47am would momentarily alter gravity on Earth and allow people to float in mid-air, then he told them to ‘jump!’ at the designated time, inspiring a rush of awed phone calls minutes later. One man claimed to have bumped his head on the ceiling and demanded compensation. The following year, the Guardian included a travel guide to the island paradise of Sans Seriffe. In 1980, the BBC World Service announced that Big Ben was being modernised, and would henceforth be known as Digital Dave.

Some japes are funnier than others, of course. Three years later, Boston University Professor of History Joseph Boskin (sort of) got one back for the public by convincing the Associated Press that April Fools’ Day had originated in third-century Ancient Rome. Hilarious. In 1992, with a hoax that perhaps seems a little less funny in our times, National Public Radio in the US announced that Richard Nixon was again running for President. (‘I never did anything wrong, and I won’t do it again’, he is alleged to have said, but didn’t.) And in 2008, The Jordanian newspaper Al Ghad carried a front-page article claiming a UFO had landed near the town of Jafr, which almost led to an emergency evacuation.

This media-cultivated tradition has only been fuelled by recent developments in old and new media, and by new sensitivities among the populace. For example, on Twitter in 2016, National Geographic announced that it would ‘no longer degrade animals by showing photos of them without clothes.’ AI is certain to lead to new streams of April hoaxes – though as AI fakes are often anything but funny, are ten a penny, and generally require virtually no (human) wit or skill to produce, tolerance for such things may wane quickly. In any case, April Fools’ Day pranks may take any form, more or less, and may be analogue or digital – so dig around in the back of a kitchen drawer for that nice bright ball of thick string and pop next door.

To learn more about Professor Waterman's work, or to raise any queries this intriguing piece might have prompted, please email Rory at rory.waterman@ntu.ac.uk