Firefighters revealed a list of their strangest 999 calls – including a child with their head stuck in a potty – as they urged the public to use “a little bit of common sense”.

The London Fire Brigade said they had responded to 659 incidents of people getting locked in toilets and 59 relating to dogs and cats trapped in unusual places in the last three years.

Seventeen calls were about children with their heads stuck in toilet seats.

The fire brigade was also called out to a woman stuck up a tree while trying to retrieve a cat, a pet snake trapped in a ring, a pigeon lodged in a chimney, a cat stuck in a gutter after jumping out of a skylight and a hamster wedged between a toilet and a wall.

Deputy commissioner Tom George said: “No matter how strange a call may seem, we will always attend if there is a genuine emergency but you should always think carefully about how to use our resources.

Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Show all 11 1 /11 Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Stringy theory The BBC's 1957 Panorama programme about harvesting spaghetti from trees in Switzerland showed women carefully plucking the strands from trees and laying them in the sun to dry. It has gone down in history as one of the most believable April hoaxes. It was presented by the very believable Richard Dimbleby, after all. Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Left-handed whopper Burger King launched a marketing campaign for its 'Left-handed whopper' on April 1 1998. A press release sent out at the time estimated that nearly 11 million left-handed customers visited the fast food outlet in the UK each year. A spokesperson from the Left Handed Club is quoted as saying: "We are delighted that Burger King has recognised the difficulties of holding a hamburger in your left hand that has a natural right bias to it. We urge all left handed hamburger lovers to visit their nearest Burger King and taste the difference for themselves." Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Alarming underwiring In 1982 the Daily Mail reported a series of signal interferences in fire and burglar alarms, television and radio broadcasts due, it claimed, to the manufacture and sale of bras containing extremely conductive copper underwire. The report claimed that the combination of body heat and nylon caused the copper to produce static electricity which interfered with signals. Getty Images Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Licking it The Sun made newspaper history with the world's first flavoured page. On page 17 a white square carries the words "Lick here" and an arrow advises viewers where to place their tongues to experience the flavour. It carries the warning "May contain nuts." The report reads: "Our ink-redible printing breakthrough comes after we teamed up with Brit boffins. It means that readers can lick this page to reveal a hidden taste. The revolution follows TV chef Heston Blumenthal, 43, unveiling lickable wallpaper." Sadly it doesn't work online. Getty Images Best historic April Fool's hoaxes The magic of colour TV In 1962 colour TV seemed like a magical thing in Sweden. So when its one television channel broadcast an advisory by the station's technical expert Kjell Stensson telling viewers that they could manually convert their black and white sets into colour by covering the screen in a nylon stocking, thousands of people gave it a try. His technical explanation for the peculiar activity was that the fine mesh of the material would cause a reconfiguration of the light particles emanating from the screen. Viewers were advised to tilt their heads from side to side to help with the readjustment process. Getty Images Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Sighing over Gordon "He thrilled them with his constitutional reform statement in 2007, he made them sigh at the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Conference, he made them clap at the St Paul's Institute," reported The Times this morning, revealing the much anticipated news that a collection of PM Gordon Brown's speeches is soon to be available in all good bookshops. "The Change We Choose; Speeches 2007-2009 contains the Prime Minister's most exciting speeches from the past three years. Those who seek inspiration in the oratory of Gladstone, Disraeli and Churchill will now be able to turn to Mr Brown's discussion of the Millennium Development Goals, his appeal for global solutions to global problems and his promise of a points based immigration system." Getty Images Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Wife not? Wikipedia is widely regarded as the font of all knowledge for journalists, students and, well, pretty much anyone who's ever used the internet. Shocking then for the feminists among us to discover that the comprehensive encyclopaedia condones wife selling. A recent entry states: "The English custom of wife selling was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage by mutual agreement that began in the late 17th century, when divorce was a practical impossibility for all but the very wealthiest. After parading his wife with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist, a husband would publicly auction her to the highest bidder. Wife selling provides the backdrop for Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the central character sells his wife at the beginning of the story, an act that haunts him for the rest of his life and ultimately destroys him." Wikipedia Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Star turn Well-known television astronomer and national treasure Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 on April fool's in 1976 that due to an unusual alignment of planets, known as the Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect, Earth would have a temporary reduction in the gravitational pull. He urged listeners to jump at exactly 9.47am to experience weightlessness. Thousands called in to say they'd felt the decrease in gravity and one woman even claimed that she and eleven friends "wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room." Getty Images Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Just my type On April 1 1977 The Guardian published a seven-page supplement on the semi colon-shaped islands of San Serriffe, situated somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse and the editorial was littered with other puns and plays on words relating to typography. The islands were used for subsequent hoaxes in 1978, 1980 and 1999 and they often turn up in the paper's cryptic crossword. Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Less fun for blondes... Stuffy global agencies aren't known for their jokes. Which made it all the more believable in April 2002 when the World Health Organization released a report claiming that natural blondes were likely to be extinct within 200 years. It said that due to the proliferation of dyed blondes and a genetic weakness, the last natural blonde would probably be born in 2202. The study was revealed to be a hoax and the WHO denied conducting the research. Getty Images Best historic April Fool's hoaxes Pinana colada? One April 1st Waitrose supermarket announced it was stocking an exotic new fruit: the Pinana, a hybrid combination of a pineapple and a banana. The advert read: "Fresh in today and exclusive to Waitrose. If you find that all Waitrose pinanas have sold out, don't worry, there's 50% off our essential Waitrose strawberries."

“A number of the more unusual calls we attend involve children or animals so we would always urge Londoners to keep an eye on their youngsters or pets to ensure they aren’t getting themselves into sticky situations which could be avoided.”

With April Fool’s Day looming, the fire brigade also asked the public not to make hoax or unnecessary calls.

The emergency service has received received more than 32,000 hoax calls since 2014, according to statistics released earlier this month under the Freedom of Information Act.

While the figures have fallen by 40 per cent over that period, firefighters still received 5,410 hoax calls last year. Of those, 4,201 were challenged and rejected by control officers and 1,209 turned out to be false alarms when crews responded.

“With the help of our control officers challenging calls, we have been able to reduce the number of hoax calls we receive and this enables us to be available for when there is a genuine emergency,” said Mr George.