The Poke fools France

Poke News: Dear Poke Readers – excuse us while we take a rare break from our usual rubbish to tell you about what happened over the other side of the Channel this week.

France lost its triple ‘eh?’ rating on Wednesday when one of our old Poke stories from August 2011 about a fictitious BBC sign interpreter, Leslie Grange, getting sacked for embellishing the news, resurfaced on the Gallic news radar as a real story.

Not only several news websites, but esteemed organs such as Le Parisien and L’Express ran the story of how the interpreter had been telling deaf viewers that Rebekah Brooks had raped a monkey and that radioactive zombies had been spotted near the Fukushima disaster site.

The story then graduated to radio, broadcast again as true on the two biggest news stations in France, RTL (“The website The Poke was the first to break this news yesterday in England”)- listen here at 1min 53 – and France Info (“Leslie Grange is very famous in Great Britain”) – listen here at 11mins 40 – before finally making it onto the telly, discussed on ‘La Nouvelle Edition’ news show on Canal + (“A mini-scandal on the other side of the atlantic”).

As soon as they realised their mistake, most sites either pulled the story or turned it into a ‘fake or real?’ piece.

Happily however they couldn’t do that to the broadcast shows. See below for wednesday’s Canal + news item, then holding their hands up to the mistake yesterday – zut alors!

(Apologies for subtitles errors etc  – we were in a rush!)