April Fool's Spoofs in UK Press - NYT Article

British newspapers, and even the BBC, seem to have more fun with April Fool's Day than does the U.S. press, as recounted in this New York Times article. Excerpt:

In 1977, the newspaper printed a supplement extolling the virtues of San Serriffe, an obscure semicolon-shaped country in the Indian Ocean comprising two islands, Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni; its leader was the authoritarian General Pica, and many readers, missing the printers' terminology that informed every aspect of the hoax, telephoned The Guardian to ask how they might get there.

But the most famous fake news report took place on television, in 1957. That was when eight million viewers watched a BBC documentary showing a family in Ticino, Switzerland, harvesting spaghetti by carefully plucking cooked strands from a tree and laying them to dry in the sun.

It was a good year for spaghetti, the BBC's Jonathan Dimbleby reported, because of the mild weather and the success of the Swiss spaghetti weevil eradication program. The BBC was deluged with calls.