Funniest thing I've read all week

http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/13/bin-blown-over-by-storm-aileen-in-birmingham-6923797/

It remembers me an old sketch of Kad & Olivier in Rock’n Roll Circus
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock%27n_Roll_Circus_(%C3%A9mission_de_radio)

A breaking news/edition about a spectacular event, with the interview of many known people. We discovered later that all of this was about a bin ‘blown over’ in a small village.

A fantastic radio program.

Older instances than that, overblown “news stories” featured in UK radio programmes like hello cheeky and “radio five live”¹ back in the 1970’s and “Shock, Horror, Probe: genuine news found in Meaning Evil” ² was used in the student newspaper at Aston in the same era.
It’s a long standing tradition to do spoof news in the UK³ and I’m sure those older than me can quote older examples.

¹ Coincidentally we do now have a radio five live channel
² The Birmingham local paper is the Evening Mail but anagrams can be quite handy.
³ Obviously when this crossed the pond Fox News got it slightly wrong and do it pretty much 24/7/365

I’m reading a book about freedom of press. It reports these kind of news before Napoleon.
It’s probably there for ever.

Aristophanes?

Morning Gavin – I rather expected you to come out with something from real history

My point of course was that it’s a humour format that has been around for a long time and so I mentioned stuff from my teen years which I knew had pre-cursors.

Actually working here – checking a proxy server.¹ Honest, not skiving.

¹ Amazing what an unscheduled change, by a change manager no less, can do.

@Steve Pampling,
The Evening Mail is no longer an evening paper and is now again called the Birmingham Mail. Issued in the morning. It also seems to e written mainly by one man :-).

Regards Ron.

It also seems to e written mainly by one man :-).

If he can spell and doesn’t think Genghis Khan was a left wing pacifist vegan then the paper has probably improved.