Only appearance: AP41

Gerald Falsely
"You can trust me because I have a pipe"

One of gentleman editor Jonathan Davies' ideas to brighten up the news section was a series of regular joke columns. Accordingly, we all sat around trying to think of them, but for some eerie reason, we drew a complete blank.

Nothing funny to put in the news section could we think of. At all.

Eventually, someone (possibly JD) came up with the dimly unpersuasive but in the circumstances stellarly imaginative It's A Lie slot. We would have a character who'd simply lie blatantly in an amusing manner, month after month. Taking a tip from Josef Goebbels (and he seemed to do okay, except for the time when the country he'd helped create shattered about his ears and he killed himself and his family - oh, and being a Nazi) we shunned the obvious, boringly game-related lies ("Hired Guns 2 is coming out next week!" for example) and decided that only colossal, man's-dog-bites-face-of-giant-leaf-shaped-child untruths could pull it off. Accordingly, we all sat around trying to think of them, but for some eerie reason, we drew a complete blank.

This went on for about three weeks. Jonathan Nash and Cam both drew up tall lists of enormous lies in an attempt to distil three or four columns' worth, but the tall lists they drew up were thoroughly terrible. The idea was thrown open to the magazine as a whole.

Frighteningly, we had unwittingly discovered an AP blind spot. Almost four weeks of powerful concentration by the entire editorial staff of AMIGA POWER had resulted in a runtish collection of unspeakably feeble joke lies unworthy of an episode of Call My Bluff starring Ned Sherrin.

Disastrously, JD, confident of his staff's ability to be entertaining like that's what they were being paid for or something, had flatplanned half a page for the blessed thing. We had to run it.

Thus for one time only, Gerald Falsely dropped his science on those assembled. Unfunnily. At length.

Fortunately, as the top half of the page was taken up with a crushingly dull news story called Turn Your CD32 Into An A1200, no one noticed. Unfortunately, this meant hardly anyone saw the ace Royal British Legion joke in that month's In The Style Of... (Cannon Fodder In The Style Of... The Army Recruiting Advertisement, page 15 fans) but "Frank's" sacrifice was appreciated.

Gerald Falsely - we hardly knew ye.