The 1957 “Spaghetti-Grows-on-Timber” Hoax: One in all TV’s First April Fools’ Day Pranks

In 1957, the BBC professional­gram Panora­ma aired one of many first tele­vised April Fools’ Day hoax­es. Above, you possibly can watch a fake information report from Switzer­land nar­rat­ed by respect­ed BBC jour­nal­ist Richard Dim­ble­by. Right here’s the fundamental premise: After a gentle 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 timber and lay them out to dry within the solar. Then we reduce to Swiss res­i­dents take pleasure in­ing a contemporary pas­ta meal for dinner—going from farm to desk, because it had been.

The spoof doc­u­males­tary orig­i­nat­ed with the BBC cam­period­man Charles de Jaeger. He remem­bered considered one of his youngster­hood faculty­train­ers in Aus­tria jok­ing, “Boys, you might be so stu­pid, you’d imagine me if I instructed you that spaghet­ti grew on timber.” Appar­ent­ly he was proper. Years lat­er, David Wheel­er, the professional­duc­er of the BBC seg­ment, recalled: “The fol­low­ing day [the broad­cast] there was fairly a to-do as a result of there have been a lot of peo­ple who went to work and mentioned to their col­leagues ‘did you see that further­or­di­nary factor on Panora­ma? I nev­er knew that about spaghet­ti.’ ” An esti­mat­ed eight mil­lion peo­ple watched the orig­i­nal professional­gram, and, a long time lat­er, CNN known as the broad­forged “the largest hoax that any rep­utable information estab­lish­ment ever pulled.”

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