[Cross-posted] I have been a regular reader of Autocar since 1980 (and the rival Motor since the 1970s) but did not know about this hidden message in the 1992 Road Test Yearbook, which I bought 15 years ago. James May, of Top Gear fame, was one of the team that put the Yearbook together (he was features’ editor then). He was fired over an incident where he put in a hidden message, using the initial caps of each road test summary in the Yearbook.
   It took Wikipedia to tell me—so it is good for something after all. (However, Wikipedia is incorrect at the time of writing in that it does not give the full quotation.) The message is, with punctuation, ‘Road Test Yearbook. So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.’ (The picture from Wikipedia is posted at my personal blog as well, minus the first 16 letters.)
   No one had spotted it internally, but readers eventually asked the magazine if they had won a prize.
   On Radio 2, May said in an interview, ‘So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little texts, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. … It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I’d actually forgotten that I’d done it because there’s a bit of a gap between it being “put to bed” and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company’s office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I’d done because I’d made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they’d written in thinking they’d won a prize or a car or something.’
   Shame he was fired over this. I thought the British sense of humour would have seen him through. But then, he might not have gone on to do his other things. Posted by Jack Yan, 13:46  permalink

comments

Post a Comment  Links to this post