My foolish days as a young reporter

PAV’S PATCH:

IT’S April 1, All Fools’ Day and not, as you might have suspected, my birthday.

There’s another 11 days until I reach the big five-three but don’t let that put you off sending a present.

There was a time when local newspapers would do something to mark April Fools’ Day, especially the weekly ones, but I think the practice has died out. I suppose people are just too busy to bother any longer.

Looking back on my own career — which I suppose you could refer to as one big joke — it seems that no prank was too silly to succeed. Around 20 years ago, my editor produced a story about an ancient tablet being unearthed by archaeologists and people in the town having to pay taxes dating back to Roman times.

As far as I was concerned it was much too silly to succeed but the girl keying it in to the computer system was totally convinced and told me in a whisper that was half anger and half panic that there was no way she and her husband were going to pay Roman taxes. Who did these Italians think they were? Was it some sort of European Commission nonsense like straight bananas and banning ounces? It took quite a while to calm her down.

Some years earlier, the same editor — who clearly loved classical themes — published a front-page picture of a shoe tree once owned by a Roman called San Dal. You’d be amazed at how many people believed it was genuine.

In my days as an eager cub reporter, I tried to impress with an April 1 story about a chimp which had escaped from a travelling circus and was terrorising Mossley. I wrote it in “hanging indent” — so that the first letter of every paragraph hung out, over the rest of the paragraph, spelling out “April Fool” if read vertically. Alas, the editor was not convinced, possibly because it didn’t mention any Romans, and promptly spiked it.

Years later, a woman paid to have a similar thing published saying, I think, “Happy birthday”. Unfortunately one of the proprietors, who fancied himself as a sub-editor and poet rather than a bean-counter, rewrote it, and the message ended up as “Humpy bingdong” or something like that. The woman was not happy.

Of course sometimes the sandal can be on the other foot. On a local paper you have to watch out for the public trying to pull stunts. For all their cynicism, hacks can easily fall for these pranks, particularly as they’ll generally do anything to avoid writing a story.

I still remember the boss nearly printing one about ostrich fairs in Stalybridge. You couldn’t make it up. Or perhaps you could...