The story behind The Sun’s cheekiest headlines & madcap stunts as we turn 50
“WE do some mad things on The Sun,” thought reporter Kevin O’Sullivan as he gazed down at the Thames 1,000ft below.
“But this caps the lot — sitting in a helicopter with a hamster on my way to see Freddie Starr, who has apparently eaten one in a sandwich.”
It was March 13, 1986 and that morning’s Sun, with its splash FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER, was flying off the shelves.
A follow-up was needed and O’Sullivan had been dispatched with photographer Steve Lewis to visit the rodent-bothering comic at his riverside mansion.
After commandeering a hamster from a pet shop, the pair were picked up in Starr’s personal chopper.
But things went wrong as soon as the comic greeted them on his lawn.
“The hamster wasn’t looking well. Completely inactive,” O’Sullivan remembers.
“As we got out of the helicopter with our heads down and the rotor blades still whirring, I thought, ‘This hamster is getting traumatised.’ I put my jacket over the cage and took it inside.
“The hamster was on its back with its legs in the air. I thought, ‘F***, it’s dead.’ Steve says, ‘Christ! What do we do?’
“Freddie suggested we nip into Maidenhead to buy another one, but I felt bad for this little animal, so I got two fingers and did CPR. And it suddenly went PLUFF and came back to life!
“We named it Concorde because it had a long nose.
“We took Freddie outside for pictures but Concorde, sitting on his shoulder, was still in shock — and crapped down his white jacket.
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“Freddie burst into hysterics and Steve got a great shot which made the front page.”
This episode encapsulates the unique humour which has defined The Sun since its launch 50 years ago.
A minor story plucked from nowhere, bestowed with a blockbuster headline which turned it into a national talking point — then a follow-up stunt that amplified the impact in an era long before social media.
Starr made clear he had not eaten anyone’s hamster, though he had joked about doing so.
No matter — this was comedy gold and boosted his reputation as a madcap entertainer. And it did the same for The Sun.
When Rupert Murdoch bought the title in 1969 it was a failing broadsheet on its knees, selling 850,000 copies a day and losing millions of pounds.
With the Daily Mirror’s circulation at 4,250,000, nobody thought there was room for a new newspaper aimed at young, working-class Britain.
Nobody, that is, except Murdoch and the dynamic team he assembled with the first editor, Larry Lamb.
The relaunched tabloid Sun — brash, sexy, cheeky and irreverent — established a rapport with its readers so potent that sales took off like a rocket, overtaking the mighty Mirror within nine years and hitting a peak of 4,783,359 in March 1996.
The Sun’s clever headlines, agenda-setting scoops, madcap stunts and patriotic pride have won fans — and ruffled feathers — the world over.
But at its heart is a brave, campaigning, fun-loving tabloid unafraid to take on the establishment.
Lamb, who died in 2000 aged 70, wrote in his book Sunrise: “Even when dealing with major tragedies, we always used to insist there was a deliberate injection of fun in the paper.
"It was hard to turn a page without finding something to smile at.”
The Sun captures the dry British wit heard on building sites and football terraces, at hairdressers and pubs — speaking the readers’ language, never talking down to them.
It invented a new genre of in-your-face, streetwise splashes shouting the indignant, cheeky voice of Britain’s lower-middle and working classes.
Sun headlines achieve iconic status like no other paper’s — GOTCHA, ZIP ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO, I’M ONLY HERE FOR DE BEERS.
The 2006 musical-themed classic HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA? tickled composer Andrew Lloyd Webber so much he has it framed in his toilet.
Though the paper became famous for puns, many of the greatest headlines simply told the story straight, like MAN WHO MADE LOVE TO PAVEMENTS, WORLD’S TALLEST BLOKE LIVES IN NEASDEN and I WAS CARLOS THE JACKAL’S DRIVING INSTRUCTOR.
WEREWOLF SEIZED IN SOUTHEND told of a snarling man with amazing strength who fought police on all fours in Essex.
The Sun is equally unrivalled when it comes to stunts.
It is one of the few workplaces where preposterous ideas are encouraged. You want to send a newspaper into space? No problem. Declare a sunbed war on Germany? Ja.
Mr Murdoch said: “The Starr splash was so ridiculous you had to read it. The real test of an editor is getting a paper out when there’s no news.”
This test presented itself to Larry Lamb in January 1970 and resulted in The Sun’s first famous stunt.
A lacklustre news list included the story of a library in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorks, where The Sun was banned for being too sexy.
Although the reporter only wrote two paragraphs, Lamb saw a chance to cause mischief — and rolled out the big guns in a light-hearted but emphatic over-reaction that set a benchmark for picking up a silly story and running with it.
Top reporter Jon Akass, waiting to interview Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess at Spandau Prison in Berlin, was diverted to cover the library stand-off near Halifax.
The Sun launched a print assault on the SILLY BURGHERS OF SOWERBY BRIDGE and a knockabout campaign followed — editorials and war-style reportage which the council took in good humour, bewildered but enjoying the limelight. The paper was eventually reinstated.
The Sun was less successful in its 1983 campaign to stop £1 notes being replaced with a new coin. Although HANDS OFF OUR NICKERS was a catchy slogan, the idea was quietly forgotten.
In 1984 Britain became involved in a row with France over quotas of our lamb being sold across the Channel.
When British truckers were attacked, The Sun’s headline was perfect — L’AMBUSH — and this was followed up by an “invasion” of Calais by a Sun squad of two Page 3 girls, a town crier and a butcher.
Former News Editor Tom Petrie says: “Stunts were the best because we moved the paper centre-stage. The Sun became the story. Editor Kelvin MacKenzie used to say, ‘I want something different.’
One morning I hadn’t a thought in my head and I just said, ‘Why don’t we urge the nation to turn towards Paris and shout, UP YOURS DELORS!’ He said, ‘Great idea!’”
That inspired front page, picturing a Union Jack-cuffed hand flicking a V-sign at France, summed up how readers felt about a European superstate in November 1990.
Crowds on Dover’s White Cliffs yelled the slogan in the direction of the French capital.
It later emerged that Delors was in Brussels anyway so wouldn’t have heard the abuse without a favourable wind, but no matter. The headline became an instant classic.
When allegations emerged in 1993 that Princess Diana had been bugged by MI5, reporter Peter Willis was sent to give the spies a taste of their own medicine.
Calling himself Agent 003½, he hid in a BBC pillar box prop outside MI5’s Millbank HQ to snoop on the snoops.
Willis recalls: “This prop had been made for actress Bella Emberg to use in The Russ Abbot Show, so it was quite large. I got into it for the pictures but lost control and fell over, and went rolling down the street with two women racing after me asking if I was OK.
“Doing these crazy stunts was how you fitted in at The Sun.”
The trouble with stunts is that you must keep raising the bar. In August 2000 Channel 4’s new reality show Big Brother was essential viewing.
Incensed by two-faced contestant “Nasty” Nick Bateman, the Bizarre showbiz team decided to warn his housemates, who were cut off from the world in a guarded compound in East London.
Derek Brown scrambled a radio-controlled helicopter and air-dropped 80 “Nick must go” notes into the BB back garden.
The set went into lockdown, live coverage was interrupted and The Sun led the TV news as Derek ran off, chased by guards and Rottweilers.
Football tournaments are a rich seam of patriotic pottiness. As England prepared to face Germany in a 2001 World Cup qualifier in Munich, there was outrage when the players were put up next to a noisy bierkeller.
To make it fair, a squad of Page 3 girls — armed with horns and a sousaphone — descended on the German team’s hotel to rouse them at 5am with Bavarian oompah tunes.
It worked like a dream — England thumped their yawning opponents 5–1, which German goalkeeper Jens Lehmann later blamed on being woken by “a band of pretty girls playing German music”.
The incident spawned a classic splash, THE OOMPAH STRIKES BACK.
Feature writer Tim Spanton walked 600 miles to Frankfurt for the 2006 World Cup, simply because he commented that it was a nice day for a stroll, and nobody had any better ideas.
And after Paul the Octopus predicted results at the 2010 event in South Africa, The Sun hired a mystic piranha named Pele for the following tournament in Brazil.
At the 2018 World Cup in Russia, England lasted longer than usual, giving ample opportunities for great front pages and baiting of the opposition.
The SCHADENFREUDE splash, when Germany got knocked out before us, was wunderbar.
Soon after, GO KANE! — a gentle dig at Colombia’s drug trade as captain Harry & Co prepared to face the South Americans — upset the Colombian embassy.
But the matter was forgotten when Colombia’s players disgraced themselves on the pitch, and this was pointed out in a spoof apology.
Sun humour engages readers with politics. The paper has never been tied to one political party, switching its support between Labour and the Tories since 1969.
We famously supported Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1990, but backed Tony Blair’s Labour in 1997 and again in 2001.
The 2005 General Election coincided with the Vatican announcing a new Pope, Benedict XVI, after the traditional white smoke signal from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel.
Feature writer Harry Macadam was asked, rather optimistically, to recreate the Vatican chimney on the roof of our Wapping HQ.
Against all odds, he succeeded — and red smoke was pumped out to show the paper’s continued support for Tony Blair.
The stunt was picked up all over the world.
Head of Features Colin Robertson explains: “Stunts bring levity to an often dry news agenda. Ideas start with one key question: What if?
“What if kids in landlocked Derbyshire, who have never been to the beach, suddenly get a beach brought to them by The Sun?
“We make those ‘what ifs’ a reality. What if we stopped doing that? Then we wouldn’t be The Sun.”
What if David Hockney redesigned our masthead? He did in 2017, giving every Sun reader their own work of art.
How do you liven up the tedious wait for a royal baby?
Just send lookalikes of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge down to St Mary’s Hospital.
The world’s media thought a new heir was imminent in July 2013 when a blacked-out Range Rover swept up to the Lindo Wing and “Wills and Kate” stepped out.
But it was Sun-branded doppelgangers Tom Moore and Nicola Maher — with a fake baby bump — who turned to wave to the cameras and ensured The Sun logo was beamed all over the world.
The stunt, headlined IT’S A PLOY, made Page One — former Head of Features Sean Hamilton, who set everything up, called it “a ridiculously exciting day”.
And there have been plenty of those at The Sun over the past 50 years.
A 1990s TV ad yelled the slogan NO SUN, NO FUN.
And although that campaign is now a distant memory, its message is still etched in the mischievous minds of everyone at Britain’s No1 paper.
