Don't believe everything

'Was it government propaganda designed to help justify Blair's war on Iraq? All Mr Tibbles knows is that his garden is one hell of a mess'

We all like to think we keep up with the news. But how well-informed are we really? And are you prepared to put yourself to the test? Well, here's the test! I am bringing you a selection of four news stories from the last week. One of them has been invented and is totally fictitious. All you have to do is spot which one it is. Think you can do it? Here we go, then!

1. The Today programme on Radio 4 intends to change its name. Starting in March it will be called The Today Programme.

"At the moment its actual name is Today," says a spokesman. "But no one ever calls it that. It's always called 'the Today programme'. So we had a £40,000 survey done to find out what we should do and the answer was unequivocal. The name Today should be dropped and replaced by The Today Programme. Our only fear now is that it will become known as 'The Programme Formerly Known as Today'."

2. White cricketers in Zimbabwe have been given a clear signal by Robert Mugabe's government that their days of supremacy are over. Angered by white dominance of the country's sporting facilities (almost all the players in Zimbabwe's cricket XI are white, and most of the cricket grounds are under white ownership), Mugabe has given an order that ownership of cricket grounds should be restored to native proprietors. Members of the Zimbabwe Veteran Cricketers Association have been given permission to occupy cricket pitches and plough them up for maize production, and already some homeless cricket ground-owners have decided to leave Rhodesia, oops, Zimbabwe, and head to Britain. Mugabe is reported to be further angered by Zimbabwe cricketers' use of black armbands to signify disapproval, as black should be an affirmative colour, and white armbands may soon be made obligatory for mourning.

3. Mr John Tibbles, who lives less than three miles from the perimeter at Heathrow, was approached two months ago by two men who offered him £10,000 for the freedom to give his garden a makeover for a TV stunt. "I was very tempted, of course," he says, "but when they started to specify that they would have to install concrete bunkers, plastic camouflage webbing and short distance radio masts, I began to wonder. Finally, when they put in a rocket launcher, I started to get worried. When I asked them if they had thought of putting in any perennial shrubs, and they said they weren't putting any plants in at all, I decided it was time to put my foot down and asked them to put in a border of leylandii. I have not heard from them since."

Their identity is still a mystery. Were they making a genuine programme about garden conversion? Were they terrorists looking for a place to fire rockets from? Or, though it is strenuously denied, was it a piece of government propaganda designed to make us think that terrorists are at work, and to help justify Blair's war on Iraq? Nobody knows. All Mr Tibbles know is that his garden is one hell of a mess.

4. One of the great problems for TV advertisers is the number of people who record ITV programmes on video and then fast forward through the ads, paying no attention to them at all. But at last a solution may have been found for this perpetual headache. A TV film company has devised a commercial which is quite comprehensible when it is being fast forwarded!

"The ad is so slow and so leisurely," says Tom Piper, head of Retroscreen, "that when you fast forward it comes back to normal. People will be zipping through the ads to get to the next bit when suddenly, in the middle of all that scrambled noise and pictures, they'll hear a voice saying 'That's why Oil of Ulay loves your skin' or something daft like that, and they'll be so gobsmacked they'll remember it for ever.

"The only problem comes when you watch the commercial at normal speed. You see, the sounds have to be so low and so slow to work for fast-forwarding that people watching it under normal circumstances will think the commercial is low and slow to the point of meaninglessness. But that's a problem we're working on."

Well? Did you spot that the last news item was completely made up? Well done! Of course, all the others were fictitious as well. But that's modern journalism for you. Honestly, you just don't know who to trust any more, do you?