Man trolls British newspaper with spectacularly fake letters
LONDON -- Ever found yourself reading through the letters sent in to newspapers -- love messages from commuters; random notes thanking people for good deeds -- and wondering if they're actually real?
Well some of them, at least, are definitely not. Irish writer Seamus O'Reilly (a.k.a. Shocko) has been trolling newspapers with hilariously fake "rush hour crushes" (semi-anonymous love messages from commuters) and tales of "good deeds" (thank you messages from strangers) for awhile now -- and a fair few of them have actually ended up in print in Metro.
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"I got the idea from when I moved to London, about five years ago," O'Reilly told Mashable. "They were consistently my favourite part of the newspaper. They were such a bewildering combination of sentiments -- everything from mundane to bewildering to occasionally menacing.
"I think after the third or fourth one I read that made me genuinely put the paper down and look at the people in the carriage around me as if they were psychopaths, I decided I wanted to send in some for myself."
O'Reilly told Mashable he's submitted about 80 or 90 letters in total, of which 19 have been published.
"The tricky part is making it funny AND believable," he said. "Either is achievable, but BOTH is nearly impossible."
O'Reilly said one day, he even got two fake letters published in the same issue: a crush and a good deed, both of which described the same event. It was the final time he managed to get his work in the paper.
"They were printed on the same page, which I suppose is a fitting end to the saga, although I've attempted to get in several more since," he said. "I blame my failure to have done so entirely on the Metro's no-doubt round-the-clock vigilance against my advances, rather than the possibility that I've just run out of ideas."
O'Reilly keeps a stockpile of rejected letters stored up and retries them every six months or so.
"It's not for me to say I'm a genius of the short form letter gag," he concluded. "That's for others to say. On a near constant basis. To every single person that they meet."
We wouldn't disagree.
You can see more of O'Reilly's work on his website.
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