BBC Panorama's April Fools Day Spaghetti Tree Hoax April 1, 1957

Summary: BBC Panorama's April Fools Day spaghetti tree hoax April 1, 1957 tells media historians not to underestimate English abilities to play newsworthy pranks.

Northern California's April spaghetti tree harvest traces lineage back to canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland; San Francisco Bay Area; Sunday, April 1, 2012, image of "sunny april morning spaghetti tree harvest": Robert Couse Baker (**RCB**), CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) assumes worldwide leadership in news content and in quality programming, even in the pioneering instance of the three-minute April Fools Day spaghetti tree hoax April 1, 1957.

Digital archives and YouTube videos bring 21st-century audiences BBC current affairs program Panorama's footage and transcripts of the spaghetti harvest festival in southern Switzerland's Ticino canton. The historic hoax concerns bumper crops on the northern shores of Lake Lugano for the owner-operator family of the Taddei (Thaddeus) hotel and restaurant in Castagnola. The prank's persuasiveness dedicates similar silent film documentary-style staging, also in March 1957, at the defunct Pasta Foods Factory on London Road in St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Panorama's pseudodocumentary enshrines the teamed expertise of cameraman and ideator Charles Theophile de Jaeger, commentary writer and producer David Wheeler and voice-over broadcaster Frederick Richard Dimbleby.

Archived footage follows young men in shirts, slacks, sweaters and ties and young women in aprons, blouses, skirts and slippers through collecting, drying and preparing spaghetti.

Digitized content gives the frost-free last two weeks of March 1957 and the "virtual disappearance" of spaghetti weevils as granting "exceptionally heavy" spaghetti crops newsworthy status. It has convincing coverage concerning Italy's "vast" Po valley spaghetti plantations, Switzerland's family-operated, frost-prone spaghetti farms and world market prices impacted by frost-impaired flavors of spaghetti. It includes insightful information on spaghetti's uniform lengths as indicative of "many years of patient endeavour by plant breeders who succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti."

The April Fools Day spaghetti tree hoax joins concluding comments that "there is nothing like real home-grown spaghetti" to closing shots of traditional spaghetti harvest festivals.

Electronic archives keep records of Panorama editor Ian Michael Peacock approving, and budgeting £100 for, his Vienna-born cameraman to dramatize an Austrian schoolteacher's scornful, student-bashing statement.

Interviews leave contemporaries and posterity with the schoolteacher's statement, "Boys, you are so stupid, you'd believe me if I told you that spaghetti grew on trees." Statistics from 1957 mention 8 million of 15.8 million television-viewing households watching Panorama's program at 8:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). They note the spoof concluding serious segments on Archbishop Makarios (Aug. 13, 1913-Aug. 3, 1977), the Duke of Edinburgh at The Yangtse Incident première and wine-tasting.

Prime-time majority over competitor Independent Television's (ITV's) Wagon Train and voluminous post-program call-ins obtain a media history niche for Panorama's April Fools Day spaghetti tree hoax.

Iconic media history status puts spaghetti trees alongside Orson Welles' (May 6, 1915-Oct. 10, 1985) radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds Oct. 30, 1938.

Media historians question mass hysteria from broadcasting Herbert George Wells' (Sept. 21, 1866-Aug. 13, 1946) novel because of regular announcements on the program's fiction-based, non-factual dramatization. Panorama's verisimilitude retains music by Hans May (July 11, 1886-Dec. 31, 1958) and Walter Stott (March 10, 1924-Jan. 14, 2009) and narration uninterrupted by content advisories. May's Spring in Ravenna and Stott's A Neapolitan Love Song sustain Dimbleby's (May 25, 1913-Dec. 22, 1965) narration of Wheeler's (Jan. 11, 1931-Aug. 6, 2003) text.

Dimbleby's terminating with "Now we say goodnight, on this FIRST day of April" tells posterity to take Wheeler's self-professed, "slightly critical attitude" toward all television content.

MySwitzerland/YouTube: "BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino"

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credit:

Northern California's April spaghetti tree harvest traces lineage back to canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland; San Francisco Bay Area; Sunday, April 1, 2012, image of "sunny april morning spaghetti tree harvest": Robert Couse Baker (**RCB**), CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07/7036208493/

For further information:

"1957: BBC Fools the Nation." BBC News > BBC On This Day > 1 April 1957.
Available @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/newsid_2819000/2819261.stm

Boese, Alex. 2015. "The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest." Hoaxes.org > April Fool's Day.
Available @ http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_swiss_spaghetti_harvest/

Inglis-Arkell, Esther. 11 February 2015. "How the BBC Fooled Viewers into Thinking Spaghetti Grows on Trees." io9.Gizmodo.com.
Available @ http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-bbc-fooled-viewers-into-thinking-spaghetti-grow-1685202841

Lewis, Rhys. 1 April 2016. "April 1, 1957: It's Pasta Joke! BBC's Spaghetti Harvest Fools the Nation." BT.com > News > World.
Available @ http://home.bt.com/news/world-news/april-1-1957-its-pasta-joke-bbcs-spaghetti-harvest-fools-the-nation-11363972628943

Lund, Ellen. 1 April 2014. "BBC Had Folks Laughing with Swiss Spaghetti Harvest Hoax." Fremont Tribune > News > Local.
Available @ http://fremonttribune.com/news/local/bbc-had-folks-laughing-with-swiss-spaghetti-harvest-hoax/article_bad43b43-1f9f-5de9-adad-fa566eddef95.html

MySwitzerland. 27 March 2013. "BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino." YouTube.
Available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

"Still a Good Joke - 47 Years On." BBC News > 1 April 2004.
Available @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/3591687.stm

"Television Ownership in Private Domestic Households 1956-2017 (Millions)." Broadcasters' Audience Research Board > Resources > TV Ownership.
Available @ http://www.barb.co.uk/resources/tv-ownership/?_s=4

Watts, Simon; and Tailyour, Claire.1 April 2014. "Is This the Best April Fool's Ever?" BBC > News > Magazine.
Available @ http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26723188