The 1957 “Spaghetti-Grows-on-Trees” Hoax: One of TV’s First April Fools’ Day Pranks

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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