We did one in the 80s about a non-championship F1 race around the streets of Woking. McLaren sent a car down for a picture really early in the morning to make it look official and were in on it. We drew a track on an A-Z map and went from there.
By 11am, a protest group had been formed to try and stop it happening. They were even more pssed off when they found out it was a wind-up. Then we offered to take a photo of them to put in the paper the following week and they quickly disappeared.
We were just howling with laughter in the newspaper editorial room over that one.
I once played a prank on my family by texting then to tell them my wife was pregnant.
This was six months after I'd had a vasectomy. ?
I told them that she swears it must be mine but that I was really upset and confused by it all and contemplating our future as a couple. ?
My sister was livid when I told them the next day that it had been an April fool. ?
She asked me what I would have done if they'd started slagging off my wife and saying that they always suspected something. Which made me then wonder why they would think that, and is it true that they had some suspicions about something? ?
Many years ago there was an article in the Sun saying they couldn't do any more resurfacing on the M1 otherwise lorries wouldn't fit under the bridges ?
I remember one year back in the 80s Radio City in Liverpool ran a story that a freak weather event had made the Mersey freeze over, hundreds went down to see it ???
In a parallel universe many eons ago it used to be a thing that we went to the pub on a Thursday lunchtime. One of our managers was not a fan of us doing this - we'd always come back to office after lunch a little late and inevitably of course reeking of a couple of pints of beer. One year we drafted a letter to him dated and delivered 1st April purporting to be from the Directors - indicating they'd like to pop round and have a chat with the team the following Thursday afternoon...This put him in a total spin. He didn't spot that the letter was from a temp PA to the MD called Avril Fowler. He swallowed it hook, line and sinker.