As if anyone could have failed to notice, what with Radio 4’s ‘Shakespeare is French’ spoof and the Guardian’s story about Labour planning to orchestrate a Brown-Cameron punch-up to boost ratings, it was April Fool’s day last week. Though Obiter must point out that anyone who took the Gazette’s story about a call for solicitors to sit a five-yearly competence test to be an April Fool, is sadly mistaken. That one was for real.

Obiter did encounter a nice little spoof in the legal world, however, from defendant legal costs specialists Gibbs Wyatt Stone (GWS). The firm sent through a press release for the launch of Legal Costs TV, which it said will ‘provide programmes featuring news, commentary and in-depth analysis on legal costs law from the country’s leading defendant costs specialists GWS’. The channel would, it claimed, ‘only be available on satellite and cable’, but for a free three-month trial lawyers were invited – as if we hadn’t guessed already – to enter the promotional code 01.04.10. For any poor recipients who still didn’t realise the joke and clicked hopefully on the link to obtain their free subscription to this fascinating channel, it went through to a fuzzy screen with the words: Web server overloaded. Due to unforeseen demand we are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. How we laughed. Although, given the quality of some of the satellite channels out there, Legal Costs TV would probably still not be the worst thing on the box.