We might not be in the mood this year, but in normal times pranksters and jokers would getting seriously excited right now. With just days to go until April Fool's, Ron McKay looks back at the origins of the day ... and some classic pranks

They where more naive times, although the world was at war. There were no concerns over pollution and the damage to the environment from the agents of warfare, the high explosives, the tanks and lorries, and whether the ozone layer was still virginal. Mass pandemics were seemingly hundreds of years in the past, although shortly to come. The preoccupation was simply to stay alive.

It’s April 1915 in France. The German army has bludgeoned both the French forces and the British Expeditionary Force, the French having lost 27,000 men in one day in an earlier battle. Britain too has suffered 250,000 casualties – nearly half of the British Regular Army. At home German warships have bombarded the coastal towns of Whitby, Hartlepool and Scarborough, killing 40 people and wounding hundreds more.

Aerial warfare is only in its infancy, although Zeppelins have drifted over London, dropping bombs on the civilians by hand. Biplanes are rarely seen over the hundreds of miles of trenches, and what would later be called dogfights between combatants mostly involves firing sidearms and rifles, although the Germans are beginning to mount machine guns on their planes. Bombing raids involve hurling the ordnance overboard from the cockpit.

The aerodrome at Lille, captured by German troops, is peaceful. It’s a bright morning when a single plane is spotted in the sky overhead, a French plane. There’s a scurry for arms and then for cover as a large spherical bomb is unleashed. On the ground they watch as it falls to earth, then bounces high in the air before settling on the ground. It’s suspected of having a time delay fuse so no one approaches it for a time. And then when the sappers tentatively creep up to to it they see that it’s a football and tied to the laces is a note saying “April Fool”.

It’s April Fool’s Day again on Wednesday, that day of the year when the media struggles to come up with stories that would convince a reader or viewer for more than a millisecond of its credibility. Fake news amplified.

How did all this begin? No one knows for sure. There’s an unlikely claim that it started with Chaucer in the 14th century in the Nun’s Priest Tale, which I studied in school and that’s far enough for me. Or, in 1561, when Flemish poet Eduard de Dene wrote about a nobleman who sent his servants on foolish errands on April 1. Difficult to believe it was just once a year.

Shakespeare, in the late 1500s, wrote about fools in his plays but never mentioned an April one, they were all the year round then. There are no references in any English-language texts or diaries or letters. The first British reference is in 1686, when the poet John Aubrey referred to the celebration as "Fooles holy day”.

Twelve years later several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to "see the Lions washed”. That was a truly cruel and class-based one. Why wouldn’t someone who had never seen, or barely heard of, a lion want to see that? Now they have stone ones which they probably wash regularly.

Contemporarily, or thereabouts, in 1977 the Guardian newspaper produced a seven-page travel supplement about the islands of San Serriffe, “a small archipeligo, its main islands grouped roughly in the shape of a semicolon, in the Indian Ocean”, which was apparently celebrating 10 years of independence. San Serif is a type face and every place on the fictional islands was named after print and typesetting terms. An in-joke.

According to the Museum of Hoaxes – clue, there isn’t one! – the BBC's Panorama programme was the first to televise an April Fool’s joke in 1957, and once again it depended on looking down on the viewer. A British audience, then unfamiliar with pasta – like today really, when you can’t get any in the shops – were shown what purported to be spaghetti trees in Switzerland. Oxbridge chortled.

In 1962 the Swedes took it a step further. Then, there was only one channel, and in black and white. An "expert" demonstrated that by pulling a nylon stocking over the TV the mesh would bend in such a way that it would become colour. No one quite knows how many pairs of stockings were ruined in homes.

In 2008 the BBC again caught the more gullible viewers out by running a video clip of flying penguins, claiming the birds were winging to tropical rainforests in South American to escape the harsh Antarctic weather.

It wasn’t long before companies and advertisers got in on it to punt their products. In 1998, Burger King placed a full-page advert in USA Today for its "left-handed Whopper" – with all the condiments rotated 180 degrees especially for left-handed diners. Ikea produced and released a high chair for dogs in 2011. And in 2015 Tesco bounced into the wheeze, promising to introduce trampoline aisles in their stores, to help us reach the top shelves more easily, which would be pointless this year because there’s nothing on them.

In 1989, probably the world's most famous self-publicist organised his own jape. A flying saucer landed in a field on the outskirts of London. One brave copper brandishing a truncheon tentatively approached it, only to flee when the door opened and a small, silver-suited figure emerged. He was Virgin’s Richard Branson and it was a hot-air balloon which he probably inflated with his own.

At least a dozen countries celebrate April Fool's Day, with the "day of lies", or dia da mentira, recognised in Brazil. In Belgium, Italy and France it’s "April Fish" day, Poisson d’Avril in French, or pesce d'aprile in Italian, when children tape fish on people's backs.

In Portugal people throw flour over each other, for reasons known only to other Portuguese, although it provides necessary income for millers.

In Scotland, April Fool's Day was formerly known as Huntigowk Day – gowk being Scottish, of course, for a stumour. People were sent on an errand to deliver a sealed message reading "Dinna laugh, dinna smile. Hunt the gowk another mile".

Nowadays we just nail shoes to floors, stretch cling film over the toilet or superglue mobile phone to refrigerators, although that may just be me. And for some reason the joke here cuts off at noon, which massively reduces the opportunity for malevolence, which is probably good for the over-stretched courts.

April Fool’s jokes and pranks are out for the media this year, given the gravity of the times. And hopefully for advertisers. Certainly no ads from GlaxoSmithKline (I don’t know why there are no spaces between them when they should be socially distancing) for a virus vaccine.

Perhaps the prank is that there’s no prank this year? Now where is the Superglue? And the soap which turns your hands black? Although that’s probably sold out like everything else.