It all began with the historian Andrew Roberts and an appearance he made on a debate some weeks before the start of the Gulf War. Roberts was on fiery, fulsome, idiotic form defending the case for invasion, the case for the existence of WMDs and the case - the ludicrous, witless, brainless, call it what you will case - that Saddam had the means to attack Britain with chemical weapons in 45 minutes. Now I am no Sun Tzu. The closest I ever came to military experience was a short stint in a cub pack in Essex that involved a lot of stick whittling and staring out of windows, but even I knew that the Iraqi Army was incapable of such a feat. You need missiles to do that sort of thing and Saddam didn't have the missiles. How was he planning to deploy the warheads? By taxi? Roberts went on to suggest that the Ba'athists were as dangerous as the Nazi party in 1939 and that Saddam was potentially more of a threat to world peace than Hitler had been, thus invoking Godwin's Law and looking very silly in the process.
It seemed to me then that Roberts was either lying to support the case for invasion or being spectacularly stupid. At that time I gave him the benefit of the doubt. With hindsight I think he was lying.
I wrote the historian a letter suggesting with all the politeness I could muster that a serious academic would never make such a ludicrous comparison and to my astonishment he wrote back. It wasn't pretty. He seemed to take my critique personally and lambasted my naivety, my impudence and my general ignorance in all matters historical. Bloody cheek. I got a B at A level.
And there it lay. The war came and didn't go. The WMDs were not found. Twitter was invented: "You should open a twitter account" a friend said to me one day "you'd be good at it, you like showing off."
I have long loved pranks. I mean truly great pranks. They are the ultimate subversion. The Dreadnought hoax , Nat Tate and of course Peter Cook's Sven From Norway are akin to great art and as the social networking age blossomed it seemed that the possibility for subversive pranking was opening up on a global scale.
In the early months of 2011 I opened a fake twitter account in the name of Norma Major and started tweeting about cheese and life as a retired PM's wife. I thought it was an obvious spoof, but as the weeks went by, to my astonishment, quite a few serious journalists followed . I had stumbled across an odd quirk of twitter. The micro-blogging website is effectively a collection of different inter-linked villages and if word spreads through a particular neighbourhood that a 'big name' has arrived, the people in it believe what their friends and followers say without taking the time to make the necessary checks. Word rapidly spreads from one village to the next - like a plague - and in no time at all everyone starts to accept "Wendi Murdoch" or "IDS" as the real deal. Odder still, the very worst offenders and very best spreaders are often journalists. The greater the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed.
Soon 'Norma' had taken on a life of her own. Her Pooterish adventures as she 'wrote' a book about the various amateur poets who had inhabited Downing Street, including a policeman called Bill and some early works by Alec Douglas-Home led to several serialisation offers arriving as DMs from big name broadsheets. Weirder still she talked frequently of John's attempts to write a book about the history of music hall, only for the 'real one' to subsequently do just that.
Then one day, quite unexpectedly, I got an email from Andrew Roberts in which he had copied in all of his quite impressive contact list. I decided that I would cherry-pick a few - and see if I could carry out an April Fool. Norma began to tweet excitedly about her new book "Hard Cheese" and then on the day itself I sent out an email from a Fake PR
Unfortunately, I sent it out to everyone with a rather smug justification on the auto-reply. I am always rather irritated with myself for that smug reply. It should have just been a big smiley face with "April Fool" on it but never mind. It was partly a joke, partly a political act, partly a situationalist prank, part revenge and yes I confess quite a big part "look at me". I am a writer and performer, "look at me" is what I have been doing since I tied a teacher's shoe-laces together at school.
The phoney PR got a really very angry email from Mr Roberts but 'she' also got an overwhelming inbox of mails from people who had taken it in good cheer. In fact most of the 'great and good' congratulated her on a cunning stunt.
A week or two later "Norma" died in a dalek attack, but I had found a new way to write and reach an audience. For nearly twenty years I had been churning out plays and film scripts, poems and novels - here finally was a ready made audience, a new and untried 'art' and a world of endless possibility.
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