Knox’s Hoax

Good morning.

I have an odd hobby – recreating lost broadcasts. Recently I had a blast – literally – re-enacting radio’s first hoax, on the early BBC 100 years ago.

The prankster behind it was a priest, Father Ronald Knox. Man of the cloth, and man of words, twinkle in his eye. He wrote books, satires, and a 1926 radio drama: a spoof news broadcast. The problem was, many Brits were just getting radio sets. Many believed what they heard.

So when Father Knox impersonated a newsreader, announcing a mob with trench mortars... listeners panicked – more-so when they heard they’d felled Big Ben. Father Knox thought listeners would get the joke, when he corrected that the Minister of Traffic hadn’t been strung up on a lamp-post, but a tram-way post. Or when he said rioters were storming his radio studio, but that they’d stopped in the waiting-room to read the Radio Times.

There were clues it was fake news. The mob’s leader was Mr Poppleberry, leader of the Movement for the Abolition of Theatre Queues. But listeners fleeing in panic didn’t stick around to hear it.

I had fun recreating this lost broadcast – explosions and all – but I appreciated Father Knox’s serious side too. He translated the entire Bible. He wrote a defence of Catholicism. And he wrote about prayer: that when prayer seems difficult, remember God knows you personally, his devotion “in the unheard whisper with which he calls you”, his own sheep, by name.

I give thanks that God made us multi-faceted – that the serious can find silliness, that priests can be pranksters, and that just as he knew Father Ronald Knox by name, he knows you and me too.

Amen