I have to admit to being momentarily caught on the hop by yesterdays April Fools joke on The Today Programme(Real Audio link) on BBC Radio 4.

The piece "revealed" that constitutionalists had discovered an obscure rule of succession which had been subsumed into the British legal system upon Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert of the German Saxe-Coburg family. According to the Saxe-Coburg rule, in the event of the remarriage of a sovereign (or sovereign-to-be), the eldest of the offspring of either partner would become the next in line to the throne. As such, Tom Parker-Bowles, who is older than Princes William and Harry, would become second in line to the throne.

It all sounded so plausible to me, especially given the great number of unforeseen legal and constitution problems which have already dogged the wedding plans. First the announced venue of Windsor Castle was found to be unsuitable due to the fact that it's declaration as a place of marriage registration would allow the world and his wife-to-be to have the right to marry there. Then there was the Queen/Princess/Princess Consort Camilla, Princess of Wales/Duchess of Cornwall (delete as applicable, or just choose what you fancy) debacle. Given what had already transpired, it didn't seem at all implausible to me that another constitutional brick had been dropped. It was only when I realised the date that the penny dropped for me. Definitely the best hoax on the Today Programme since the demise of Andrew Gilligan.

Also on the April Fools theme, the New York Times yesterday told the real story of Joe Berton, the model for Sidd Finch, who was the fictional subject of a celebrated April Fools article written by George Plimpton in Sports Illustrated in 1985. According to the story, Hayden Finch was a Harvard dropout who went to Tibet seeking enlightenment and learnt along the way how to fling a baseball with pin-point accuracy at 168mph. Having changed his name to Sidd (short for Siddharta, loosely translated as 'aim attained', or perhaps 'perfect pitch'!), he returned to the US and was scouted by the New York Mets. Great numbers of baseball fans fell for Plimpton's deviously crafted story, including several major league General Managers who immediately lodged complaints of unfair competition with the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. The article was never announced as an April Fools gag. Instead, Plimpton followed up the story with an statement the following week that Finch had announced on April 1st that he had decided not to pursue a career in baseball after all, claiming that his accuracy had deserted him. "The Perfect Pitch is now an instrument of Chaos and Cruelty", he was alleged to have stated.

Joe Berton was a friend of Lane Stewart, the photographer tasked with taking the shots to accompany Plimpton's article. Berton's 6'4" gangly frame would make him ideal to pose for the pictures, thought Stewart. Although Berton thought no more about it, the article received such notoriety that he is still to this day recognised in the street as the mythical Sidd Finch.

I can't finish on this subject without mentioning what must be the most celebrated British April Fool. In 1957, the Panorama programme featured an article on the Swiss spaghetti harvest. The serious nature of the piece and its attention to detail convinced a large number of gullible Brits, sufficiently unfamiliar with foreign food at that time, that spaghetti did indeed grow on trees. Garden centres were inundated with enquiries on whether it was possible to get trees which would produce spaghetti in their own gardens (Real video clip here).