On April 1, the British Broadcasting Centre’s (BBC) current affairs programme called Panorama, aired a three minute report showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family’s “spaghetti tree”. It was conceived by the team a week earlier and was aired the following Monday which happened to be April 1!
Charles de Jaeger, a photographer, told the editor of Panorama, Michael Peacock that when he was in school in Austria, teachers would say that he and his classmates were so stupid that if someone told them spaghetti grew on trees they would believe it. This, sparked off the idea of a perfect hoax for April 1. Jaeger was sent off with a budget of £100.
According to the BBC footage, the family in the canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland gathered a bumper spaghetti harvest thanks to the mild winter. And, thanks to that, the spaghetti weevil too disappeared. They named it the Harvest Festival and it was aired along with a discussion of how the perfect length had been attained after years of tending these crops. They went on to say that the spaghetti was then dried and served fresh to guests at restaurants who relished home-grown spaghetti.
Some of the scenes were filmed at the Pasta Foods factory on London Road, St Albans, in Hertfordshire, and at a hotel in Castagnola, Switzerland. The report was made believable with the voiceover by broadcaster Richard Dimbleby who lend credibility to the story. Dimbleby was held in high esteem by television viewers.
Why the clip worked
Seven million of the 15.8 million homes in Britain had television sets back then. Pasta was not a part of their daily food and was considered a delicacy that came in a can. No one knew that pasta was made of wheat flour and water. BBC received many phone calls asking how spaghetti could be cultivated and how to go about it. BBC asked them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.
Decades later, Cable News Network (CNN) an American channel called this broadcast the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled off . It earned them a place in the history of April 1 jokes.
To see how spaghetti grows, log on to: https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqp0x6ajGEs
