It’s the annual day of practical jokes and pranks that’s been celebrated for centuries all over the world.

Some say April Fool’s Day - today - has its roots in the Roman festival of Hilaria, which was marked by masquerades, disguise and trickery. It’s more likely to trace back to the change of the calendar year, back in 16th century France.

Pope Gregory XIII introduced his own Gregorian calendar, celebrating New Year’s Day on January 1. It replaced the Julian calendar, which celebrated New Year on April 1. So only “fools” forgot the calendar change and continued to celebrate the new year in Spring.

Some in France refused to accept the new calendar, and became the butt of tricks and jokes and were called “Poisson d’Avril” or “April Fish”. Even today in France, the annual joke is to try and attach a paper fish to the people’s backs to make them the Poisson d’Avril.

Here in Ireland, we’re only supposed to prank until noon – or else the joke’s on you. As the saying goes: “April fool is dead and gone. You’re the fool who carried it on.” In Greece, it’s said a successful prankster will have good luck all year long.

Celebrities love getting in on the April Fool’s Fun. Monica Lewinksy - who gained worldwide notoriety for her affair with Bill Clinton when he was president - has told how she loves pranking people on April 1.

Her best joke, she revealed in Vanity Fair yesterday, was pretending she had a fling with Boris Johnson, who went on to become PM. “I briefly met Boris Johnson at a Christmas party in London in 2015. I was with friends who knew him and somehow we ended up taking a photo together. Come April Fools, I pranked those same friends by texting them I had slept with him the night before.

One replied: ‘THIS time Monica, do not tell anyone else!’ Nearly ten years later, they have reminded me of this joke every April.”

The keen prankster says keeping it real and pranking by text are her top tips. “The two keys to success are: always start with a kernel of truth, and always go all in on the joke.

“My inability to keep a straight face was an obstacle, but technology eventually fixed that. Pranking over text became my speciality.”

The best April Fool’s Day prank was when James Corden tricked David Beckham into believing a hideous sculpture of him was real.

Corden hatched an elaborate plan in 2019 to bring Beckham to his old club LA Galaxy, where a statue in his honour was being unveiled.

The horrible statue looked nothing like Beckham, but the footballer was completely fooled, staring blankly in horror and saying: “I honestly look like Stretch Armstrong.”

In 2023, Heidi Klum pretended to be pregnant for a social media post, wearing a prosthetic bump. However the gag backfired somewhat, with some deeming it offensive and insensitive. Meanwhile, Kendall Jenner pranked her family with news of a fake engagement - complete with engagement ring - in 2021.

In 2018, Elon Musk joked on Twitter that Tesla had gone bankrupt, triggering a seven per cent drop in shares.

But billionaire Richard Branson probably pulled off the best world prank ever in 1989, when he launched a UFO over London. As it flew over a motorway, vehicles began to grind to a halt and the police were deployed, like a modern day War of the Worlds.

“The army had been alerted and radio and TV stations had all gone on the air about a UFO flying low over London,” he said later.

“The police surrounded us, then sent one lone policeman with his truncheon across the field to greet the alien.” The UFO’s door opened slowly with dry ice billowing from it, before the “alien” walked down and sprinted away.

Branson said the police weren’t too impressed at first, but couldn’t resist joining in the fun. The UFO was called Virgin Galactic Airways – years before the company became a real life commercial spaceline.

In 1957, the flagship BBC current affairs show Panorama aired a segment on a spaghetti crop in Switzerland. Taken-in viewers contacted the programme to find out how to grow their own spaghetti.

In the 1950s, a Dutch TV station told viewers the Leaning Tower of Pisa had collapsed, while in 2002, Tesco announced to customers it had developed a GM carrot that whistled.

In 1976, renowned astronomer Patrick Moore appeared on BBC Radio 2 and announced that at 9:47am, we would feel what he called the ‘Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect’.

He said that at that exact moment, the planets would align and gravity on Earth would get a tiny bit weaker, so if you jumped in the air at exactly the right moment, you would almost float In 1980, the BBC world service told listeners Big Ben would go digital, with beeps instead of the famous bongs.

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