Britain Falls Into Terrifying Time Warp Thing

A huge international aid effort has been launched in an attempt to relieve the appalling suffering of 61 million Britons, who woke up this morning to discover to their horror that their backward nation had fallen into some sort of time warp thing.

An ashen-faced Gordon Brown appealed for calm in an emergency broadcast, vainly attempting to reassure the panic-stricken population that the government was doing its utmost to restore order.

The disaster occurred at precisely 2am, when a lot of clocks, computers, mobile phones and digital TV recorders suddenly leapt an hour backwards in time. Worse was to come, however, as horrified members of the public investigating the unprecedented temporal phenomenon discovered that some clocks, most microwave ovens and many watches seemed to be completely unaffected - particularly old-fashioned ones with hands.

"It's almost like some bits of the fabric of reality have shifted into a different time, yeah, but others haven't?" wailed a traumatised clubber who had been clinging to a lamp-post for several hours. "A few hours ago, just before dawn like, I saw some bloke go into that church tower across the road, yeah, and all of a sudden like the minute hand started whizzing round backwards. In a few seconds, an hour of my life was sort of literally wiped out in front of my eyes. Fuck knows what would of happened if I'd been walking towards it. Now I'm too scared to move."

"I tell you this, man," added the fear-crazed wreck, "I ain't never doing crystal meth and Magners again, so long as I live."

Even more frighteningly, all UK-based broadcasts appeared to go back an hour in time, according to their time-checks - yet the shows were playing a completely different selection of music, compared to the previous hour.

"It's like it's not just that we've gone back in time - it's like we jumped into some weird alternative reality," gibbered a terrified citizen, staring in horror at his wristwatch. "But what really scares me is that all the programmes on my girlfriend's alarm clock radio keep telling us the new time, yet the LED still shows the old one. How can that be? Have I got older or younger? Oh, God in heaven help us."

Foreign countries have promised to send help to stricken Britain, but have so far been thwarted by the fact that the whole world seems to be split into different 'time zones'.

"A plane loaded with life-saving clocks could take off from New York at noon, yet when it arrived at Heathrow after a seven-hour flight, it would be eleven o'clock at night," said a spokesman for the United Nations Disaster Relief Office. "Is it fair to expect flight crews to sacrifice four hours from their lives on every single flight? That's a big ask."

Meanwhile, Britons are being urged to turn up for work at whatever they think is the usual time tomorrow, as the nation's leading boffins work round the clock to find a solution.

"I'm sure there must be a way to get things back to normal," promised Professor Stephen Hawking, who himself awoke to find he had been reset to the new time. "But it might take several months."