The BBC has been a reliable and balanced source of news since its creation in 1922. They've had the odd slip up over the years, most notably the cab driver they mistook for a tech expert, but nothing too damning.
Ultimately, we can all fall victim to a good trolling, as this story shows.
Comedian Darius Davies woke up on Saturday to news of a Bratislava-bound Ryanair flight being grounded in Berlin. The reason? The stag do that boarded the plane in Luton got way out of control.
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Like a true piss-taker, Darius thought he'd email the BBC to say he'd been on the flight. He had not. He was at home in London. He didn't expect anything to come from it until a BBC journalist got back to him asking for a chat.
"I just thought it would be funny. I do things to make me laugh. I thought it'd be funny to see what happened," Darius told us.
"I told them I saw [the stag] get his nob out. I told them I could describe his penis because I saw it a lot. He rang me back to see if I was free to talk. I'm talking to him about all this ridiculous stuff and I'm cracking up. He was going on like, 'Oh, this sounds terrible' so I told him I had videos."
The unrelated Ryanair video Darius sent
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Darius sent the journalist a random video he had from another Ryanair flight where there were English police officers on board. He thought the game would be up at this point, but it wasn't.
"On Monday morning I get a call from the BBC. They wanted me to come into the studio but I couldn't so I ended up on Skype. Right up until I was actually appearing, I wasn't sure whether to carry on."
Thankfully, Darius did carry on, or we'd never have been able to watch this footage from his YouTube channel of him on the BBC:
That's right folks, Darius actually said that a drunk man shouted, 'I don't care if we crash, I have a helicopter!' as he spun his penis around and around, on national television.
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"Before we went on, the presenter told me to describe it as much as possible without saying certain words. She cut me off just before I started bursting out laughing."
It doesn't end there. The next day, Darius got a call from his agent (he's a comedian, remember) who told him ITV wanted to speak to him.
"I called the guy and he wanted to talk. I mean, the guy got my number from a comedy agent. Alarm bells should have been ringing by now, surely? I did the interview in front of Big Ben and then found out it was going live on the local news. A German station even called me offering me £200 but I didn't want to commit fraud," Darius continued.
The Daily Mirror picked up the story and reported Darius' words as fact. The paper later had to retract a fair few quotes from their story.
Darius concluded, "All they had to do was ask where I flew from and I'd have been stumped. I mean, no disrespect, but this is the BBC, right?"
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If you want to read his fuller and franker account of the ridiculous events that happened over the weekend, you can do so over on his blog. There's also a recording of Darius' conversation with the journalist on there, which is a truly spectacular listen.
Well played, Darius.
If you want to see more of Darius, you can do so at this year's Edinburgh Festival where his show, Road To Wrestlemania, all abou how he wanted to be a pro wrestler, is showing between the 8th and 28th of August.
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Topics: Prank, BBC, Ryanair, comedian