I don't think that April fools joke should have been played back then even.  Nowadays of course such a hoax would not be funny at all because people really do turn up at workplaces and murder employees.
Take the horrific Charlie Hebdo incident for instance.
That being said I do like some harmless April Fools pranks by the media.
Like the one where a radio station told listeners before they went to work that day they needed to wrap a plastic bag around their telephone receivers (in the days when everyone still had land lines) because the telephone company was going to blow the dust out of the phone lines that day.
Funny and harmless.
I also liked the prank where the news announced the country was going to switch to "metric time" and had a prankster pose as an expert to tell people how to convert regular time to metric.
Then there's silly phone pranks,
Every April 1st the Toronto zoo gets a flood of phone calls from wags asking to speak to zoo employees with names like Elly Fant  Don Key and Iggy Wahna.
 

newsguy1 wrote:

I don't think that April fools joke should have been played back then even.  Nowadays of course such a hoax would not be funny at all because people really do turn up at workplaces and murder employees.
Take the horrific Charlie Hebdo incident for instance.
That being said I do like some harmless April Fools pranks by the media.

 

Obviously the Toronto Police agreed with that sentiment back then, too!

I think in this instance, the fallout from the prank was more amusing than the actual prank itself. It certainly does point to a different time and atmosphere, long before workplace shootings had become sadly all too common. Although one thing to note, Coop appears to be painting the culprit as a random wackjob that's after him specifically, as opposed to some raging lunatic with an axe to grind going on a rampage. I think Coop can be forgiven, though, given that he was an (obviously) stupid 20-something year old (at least at that moment), who may have not fully understood the consequences of his actions, and also because of the fact that he's given us lots of great radio and genuine laughs during his extensive career.

It also points to a very different time when station management would go to the mat for their employees. Nowadays, saying something even slightly off-colour that could be considered offensive to even a miniscule segment of the public could get you shown the door, as well as making you persona non grata to anywhere else you might go to try to seek future employment. Radio and TV stations aren't interested in cultivating "stars" in the way they used to. They're more of a liability than an asset, especially to the bean counters. Most stations are looking for someone that's just popular enough to pull in the ratings, but not so popular that the station would end up with a black eye in the event that they have to get rid of them.


PJ

 

Gotta say he was very convincing. That's one smooth "operator!"