The Guardian and San Serriffe
This April Fools’ Day in the spirit of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s upcoming exhibition, Manchester’s Guardian, we reflect on The Guardian newspaper’s iconic stunt of San Serriffe.
On April 1st 1977, The Guardian ran a special report on the islands of San Serriffe, a semicolon-shaped paradise near the Seychelle Islands. The existence of this oasis was, of course, a myth- believable at first glance but suspicious on closer inspection.
Under the layer of satire, The Guardian tested its journalistic boundaries and its readership’s ability to separate fact from fiction.¹ San Serriffe is a play on San Serif, which is the name for a particular typeface; examples of it include Arial, Comic Sans and Gill Sands (the latter being a cove featured on the western coast of the Lower Caisse island of Sans Serriffe). Many readers praised the paper and, in some cases, played along with the joke; others were fooled and angered by it.² What was the thinking behind the creation of San Serriffe? What can a report of a faraway land tell us about the Western view of the ‘other’? How do we view this joke now when the threat of fake news is growing and constant?
It’s Not All Doom and Gloom
The concept for a joke report came from an employee within the newspaper’s advertising department, Philip Davis.³ The Editor of The Guardian at the time, Peter Preston, saw this as an opportunity to lift the mood of the news away from the ‘diet of gloom’⁴ (within the acceptable realm of April Fools’ Day) and possibly attract some advertisers to play along. In Preston’s eyes, it had the right ingredients to reflect the spirit of The Guardian as he saw it at the time:
‘you could…be thought of as terribly pompous…it was a sort of British waist-coated, editor, men’s club sort of world and The Guardian isn’t like that; wasn’t like that. We had a lot of laughs, I’m sure they do still have a lot of laughs, and it seemed absolutely crazy to me not to actually reflect that.’⁵
The resulting seven-page report covered the political, cultural and economic condition of the archipelago, in considerable detail for a fake island. Concealed amongst the realistic sounding reporting on subjects such as the fake leader of the non-existent country, General Pica, are more obvious fantastical descriptions:
‘Tourists fortunate enough to be permitted to visit the Flong settlements of San Serriffe during the summer solstice will be rewarded by the colourful spectacle of the Gallee sect stamping and shrieking in unison in the Dance of the Pied Slugs.’⁶
Adverts from well-known companies such as Guinness, Kodac and Texaco added to its plausibility. Guinness invited readers to enter their spoof competition to win a ‘conversion kit glass’. This is the very essence of April Fools, both serious and absurd:
According to one co-author, Tim Radford, the reaction to the report was widespread:
‘Our readers loved it so intensely and with such commitment that by the time I got into the office…we had received a formal protest from the San Serriffe Liberation Front on headed notepaper, objecting to its omission from the history. The Times carried a story about our April foolery and the BBC morning news programme interviewed a spokesman for General Pica. An American who was due to be deported by the Home Secretary threw the Foreign Office into confusion by demanding he be flown to San Serriffe.’⁷
The report has certainly endured through time, and San Serriffe continues to be referenced in April Fools’ jokes. Today’s cultural and social touchpoints are dramatically different to what they would have been forty years ago. Here are a couple of thoughts on how the piece has aged, which you may have some views on yourselves:
Cultural Stereotypes
When looking at the description of the magical island, its people and culture, there are some elements within the copy which can be examined further, for example:
‘The thatched huts still occupied by the irrepressible Flongs, an indigenous people at the tip of the southern island, are generations away from the two international airports at Bodoni, the capital and Villa Pica.’⁸
The direct comparison between the thatched hut and the airport, implies that an indigenous way of life- the local culture- is somehow primitive and less developed or ‘generations away’ from the modern technological world. It’s indicative of the barrier that the Western gaze creates between itself and ‘the other’. The article goes on to clearly emphasise the opportunistic nature of Western capitalist enterprise ‘British companies are known to be interested in exploiting…San Serriffe’s financial profile’.⁹ Could this suggest anything about the Britain’s post-war attitude towards its former colonial countries and their local populations?
Fake News
When the authors of San Serriffe were writing their report, the era of fake news had not arrived. Today, we see it used for financial gain- some attention-grabbing fake news is created solely to generate revenue through advertising- and as political propaganda.¹⁰
Moira Smith suggests that ‘if news is constructed rather than simply reported, what does it say about its truth value?’¹¹ It’s unfortunate to think that fake news would take all of the punch out of an April Fools’ Day joke, but it raises the question: does a spoof like San Serriffe have a place within newspaper journalism today or whether it is a relic of a past era?
On a larger scale, if the joke was published today, would it be lost amidst the fog of commentary and speculation that we see every day through social media?
Thanks for reading, we look forward to welcoming you to the exhibition in the coming months and hearing your thoughts on these stories.
Special thanks to Professor Robert Poole for loaning his copy of the San Serriffe report which will be showcased in the upcoming exhibition on The Guardian.
Additional Reading and Resources from The Guardian:
‘The leader’s rise to power in San Serriffe’
‘Peter Preston and the islands of San Serriffe — The Story podcast’
Images reproduced with the permission of Guardian News & Media.
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Sources:
1. Radford, Tim and Max Sanderson. “Peter Preston and the islands of San Serriffe — The Story podcast.” The Guardian: The Story. Podcast audio. January 9, 2018. Accessed March 30, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2018/jan/09/peter-preston-and-the-islands-of-san-serriffe-the-story-podcast
2. Smith, Moira. “Arbiters of Truth at Play: Media April Fools’ Day Hoaxes.” Folklore 120, no. 3 (2009): 274–90. Accessed March 30, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40646531.
3. Narewska, Elli, Susan Gentles and Mariam Yamin. “April fool — San Serriffe: teaching resource of the month from the GNM Archive, April 2012.” The Guardian. March 27, 2012. Accessed March 30, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/gnmeducationcentre/archive-educational-resource-april-2012
4. Radford, Tim and Max Sanderson. “Peter Preston and the islands of San Serriffe — The Story podcast.”: 00:08:06
5. Ibid.: 00:08:36- 00:09:06
6. Radford, Tim. “Spiking the Cultural Roots.” The Guardian. April 1, 1977. Accessed March 30, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/news/1977/apr/01/leadersandreply.mainsection
7. Radford, Tim and Max Sanderson. “Peter Preston and the islands of San Serriffe — The Story podcast.”: 00:10:53- 00:11:34
8. Taylor, Geoffrey. “Three Point Key to Prosperity.” The Guardian. April 1, 1977. Accessed March 30, 2021. https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/media/book/showBook/Manchester~91~1~438861~245262
9. Ibid.
10. Tambini, Damian. “How advertising fuels fake news.” LSE. February 24, 2017. Accessed March 30, 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2017/02/24/how-advertising-fuels-fake-news/
11. Smith, Moira. “Arbiters of Truth at Play: Media April Fools’ Day Hoaxes.”
