In 1957, the BBC program Panorama aired one of the first televised April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Above, you can watch a faux news report from Switzerland narrated by respected BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby. Here’s the basic premise: After a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” the residents of Ticoni (a Swiss canton on the Italian border) reap a record-breaking spaghetti harvest. Swiss farmers pluck strands of spaghetti from trees and lay them out to dry in the sun. Then we cut to Swiss residents enjoying a fresh pasta meal for dinner—going from farm to table, as it were.
The spoof documentary originat…
In 1957, the BBC program Panorama aired one of the first televised April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Above, you can watch a faux news report from Switzerland narrated by respected BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby. Here’s the basic premise: After a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” the residents of Ticoni (a Swiss canton on the Italian border) reap a record-breaking spaghetti harvest. Swiss farmers pluck strands of spaghetti from trees and lay them out to dry in the sun. Then we cut to Swiss residents enjoying a fresh pasta meal for dinner—going from farm to table, as it were.
The spoof documentary originated with the BBC cameraman Charles de Jaeger. He remembered one of his childhood schoolteachers in Austria joking, “Boys, you are so stupid, you’d believe me if I told you that spaghetti grew on trees.” Apparently he was right. Years later, David Wheeler, the producer of the BBC segment, recalled: “The following day [the broadcast] there was quite a to-do because there were lots of people who went to work and said to their colleagues ‘did you see that extraordinary thing on Panorama? I never knew that about spaghetti.’ ” An estimated eight million people watched the original program, and, decades later, CNN called the broadcast “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.”
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