On April Fools Day 1957, the BBC aired a fictitious story about the Swiss spaghetti harvest which depicted laborers reaping spaghetti noodles from spaghetti trees. Scores of people contacted the station to find out how they could obtain their own “spaghetti bush.” Today we look back at this classic hoax. The BBC Swiss Spaghetti Harvest During the early days of television in 1957, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) televised a mock segment in reference to a Spaghetti Harvest in Switzerland. Alleged to be the brainchild of an Austrian camera man, the three minute bit was broadcast on April 1st of that year, and displayed the harvesting of spaghetti noodles from trees by a group of Swiss cultivators. The farce appeared as part of an esteemed current affairs show called Panorama, and the narrator was a dignified anchor by the name of Richard Dimbleby. The BBC estimates that the transmission was witnessed by 8 million viewers, and large numbers of spectators were taken in by the prank. Response and Backlash At the time, spaghetti was a rare and novel luxury in Britain, and much of the population was unaware of how spaghetti was actually made. According to the BBC, hundreds of viewers subsequently [...]
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