Guestling Bradshaw CE Primary School

In 1980 the BBC reported that in order to keep up with the times, Big Ben was going to be given a digital clock face. The announcement shocked listeners, who protested about the change. The BBC Japanese service also announced the clock hands would be sold to the first four listeners to contact them. One Japanese seaman in the mid-Atlantic immediately radioed in with a bid.

In 2007 images of an 8-inch mummified creature resembling a fairy were posted on the website of the Lebanon Circle Magik Company.  A man had apparently found the creature while walking his dog. The website received tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of emails. The owner of the site confessed that he had used his skills as a magician's prop-maker to create the creature, but people continued to email, refusing to believe the she was not real.

Burger King published a full-page advertisement in USA Today in 1998. The advert announced a new item on their menu: the Left-Handed Whopper. Especially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans, the new burger included the same ingredients as the original Whopper, but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees. Thousands of customers went into restaurants to request the new sandwich, while many others requested their own 'right handed' version.

A barge towing a giant iceberg appeared in Sydney Harbour in April 1978. Dick Smith, a local adventurer and millionaire businessman, had been loudly promoting his scheme to tow an iceberg from Antarctica, saying he was going to carve the berg into small cubes, which he would sell to the public for ten cents each. These cubes, fresh from the pure waters of Antarctica, were promised to improve the flavour of any drink they cooled. Local radio stations provided coverage of the scene, but when it started to rain, the fire-fighting foam and shaving cream washed away, uncovering the plastic sheets beneath!

In 1860 people throughout London received the following invitation: "Tower of London: Admit Bearer and Friend to view annual ceremony of Washing the White Lions on Sunday, April 1st, 1860. Admittance only at White Gate." By noon a large crowd had gathered outside the tower. They were disappointed to find that lions hadn't been kept in the tower for centuries, let alone white lions.

In 1977 the Guardian published a seven-page "special report" about San Serriffe, a small country located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several islands that make the shape of a semi-colon. The two main islands were called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. They did an in-depth series of articles on the history, geography and daily life on these idyllic islands. The Guardian’s phones rang all day as readers wanted more information about the perfect-sounding holiday spot, and the hoax began a tradition in newspapers to try and fool their readers.

During an interview on BBC Radio 2, on the morning of 1 April 1976, the astronomer Patrick Moore announced that at 9:47 am, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to take place. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would reduce the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. The BBC received hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported she and her 11 friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room!

In 1980 Soldier magazine managed to fool the Daily Express with its revelation that fur on guards’ bearskin helmets continues to grow and needs regular trimming. The article quoted one Major, who said ‘Bears hibernate in the winter and the amazing thing is that in the spring the skins really start to sprout.’ A photo accompanying the story showed Guardsmen sitting in an army barber shop having their helmets trimmed. Amazingly, the Express ran it as a real story.

In Sweden, in 1962, there was only one television channel, and it was shown in black and white. The station announced that their technical expert, Kjell Stensson, was going to tell people how to view colour images on their black-and-white sets. Researchers, he said, had recently discovered that covering your television screen with a nylon stocking would cause the light to bend in such a way that it would appear as if the image was in colour. All viewers had to do, Stensson said, was to cut open a stocking and tape it over the screen of their television set. Thousands of viewers fell for the hoax, men in particular, and tried it out.

One of the best-known public pranks is the 1957 news show broadcast by Panorama. It was a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. This was apparently because of an unusually mild winter and the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, with video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. In response they were told: "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."