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Coronavirus

26th Mar 2020

Wembley Lasagne: Meet the man behind the viral WhatsApp audio clip

Simon Lloyd

“The underground heating at Wembley, that’s going to bake the lasagne…”

For Billy McLean, it was nothing more than a spontaneous joke, shared with teammates at Old Thorntonians FC.

Poking fun at the spate of coronavirus misinformation shared across Facebook and other social media platforms, he recorded a short audio clip claiming that, amidst fears of food shortages, the Ministry of Defence was poised to take charge of Wembley Stadium in order to cook the world’s biggest lasagne.

Within hours of Billy posting it to the group WhatsApp, the clip had been shared high and wide, rapidly becoming – for want of a better word given – viral.

We spoke to Billy about the clip and his surprise at just how far it went. While he’s confident nobody *really* took his spoof too seriously, he believes there is another more serious layer (see what we did there?) to it, highlighting the ease with which fake news can be circulated…