Stop Boredom – Be Cillie

April 1st is traditionally April Fool’s Day. A day when we trick our fellow humans with hilarious pranks and jolly japes.

These day, of course, it’s more likely that we’ll be quite cruel and nasty to those who are quite fragile and deserve a little bit of thought before becoming nothing more than our victims.

Yet, there was a time when things were a little more relaxed and humour was more laugh out loud all round and mainly clever rather than victim led.

During the early 1970s, despite the three day weeks, power cuts, winters of discontent and general suffering, there was a new humour. Growing out of the odd new humour of the Goon Show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was the humour bible of every spotty faced youth. Every one of them knew the sketches off by heart, and every one of them appreciated how to be annoyingly ‘silly’, ‘too silly’ in fact.

It was 40 years ago, during the early 1970s that I and my peer group started the “Cillie Society”. Remember, there was no internet, no mobile phones (in fact, only about one in three of us had a phone at home), and CB radio hadn’t yet arrived into the UK.

Long distance communication was via a concept called “writing letters” (it’s a bit like email, but using a pen and a sheet of paper, and folding the paper up and putting it in an envelope – ask your Gran about letters, she probably remembers them), or via print media like the music oriented magazines like Record Mirror, Sounds or New Musical Express. It was via the free ads in Record Mirror that we publicised the Cillie Society. In exchange for a token payment people could get a membership, erm, memberboat card declaring them to be very silly (spelt ‘cillie’, of course, because that was, erm, silly, erm, in those days…) and a duplicated ‘silly’ magazine called “Weird Concept” (“WC” for short – geddit?).

I don’t remember the exact details, but we did reach a good few hundred members at the peak from all over the country, enough to warrant buying our own Gestetner duplicator! The membership was probably lots of isolated teenagers who were reaching out from the solitude of their bedroom to find the like-minded. These days they’d be doing this via Facebook of course. It is weird to ponder that in those days people really were quite isolated and there really was no such thing as ‘communication’.

I don’t recall why the Cillie Society disappeared, but it was probably because the whole thing was, like Monty Python, just a moment in time.

I have kept nothing from the Cillie Society, but some recent years ago a previous Cillie Society member tracked me down via the ‘net and sent me a typical type of letter that we sent out (pictured!). This one was sent out in 1977, which was some years after the Cillie Society had given up and we’d all moved on, but obviously I still had some of the “Weird Concept”s to give out to those latecomers who came begging.

Anyway, one of the demands of the Cillie Society was for April 1st to be declared a national holiday and for it to be a day when instead of work or school people would meet at designated local points and ‘be silly’. The idea being that local communities would have a day of fun and victimless larking about, letting off steam and enjoying themsleves before getting back to the daily grind the next day.

Time’s moved on and the juvenile witterings of the Monty Python lovers of the day are maybe no longer appropriate in this millennium. However, something like a national or even international day of just having fun and being good humoured could maybe lift all our spirits.

Happy April Fool’s Day!