For April Fool's Day, jokesters staged a "royal wedding" in London with William and Kate look-alikes. The event, reported by CBS News and others, turned out to not be a regular April Fool's Day prank: it was a carefully staged publicity stunt for a new book, "Wills and Kate Up the Aisle" by Alison Jackson. The look-alikes paraded down London streets, posed in front of a church, ate at KFC and even went round Picadilly Circus in a horse-drawn carriage, causing even more traffic chaos than usual.
The book makes fun of the royals and all the wedding fuss, but it is just one of a series of spoofs, tributes and spin-offs that are now flooding the market and will be forgotten in a year, or perhaps auctioned off at King William's Silver Jubilee.
An appropriately named Mary Wills played the Queen, Simon Watkinson impersonated Prince William, and Jodie Bredo was Kate Middleton. It's unknown who played the corgis. All three are professional actors. Only an occasional tourist was, reportedly, fooled for a few minutes, but most present found the joke amusing.
This wasn't the only royal-related prank pulled on April 1st. The Guardian, no friend to the royal family, said that it was now unabashedly royal. It isn't. A breaking news headline reported that the royal wedding was off...and then a correction said it was back on again. Meanwhile, The Daily Mail reported that Kate Middleton was shopping for baby clothes.
Give it a year, and maybe that last one, at least, might become true.
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