The BBC April Fools Spaghetti Harvest Report – IOTW Report

The BBC April Fools Spaghetti Harvest Report

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The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools’ Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware that spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water. Hundreds of viewers phoned into the BBC, either to say the story was not true, or wondering about it, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.”

ht/ jd hasty

10 Comments on The BBC April Fools Spaghetti Harvest Report

  1. My dad had mentioned this to me about 45 years ago. He saw it on the Tonight Show (with Jack Paar) in about 1959 or so. Dad had been drinking…a bit. He thought, “I have to get one of those trees.” The next morning he said to himself, “…wait a minute…”

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  2. I was not aware there were any reputable news outlets left by November 2020. But then again, I had stopped paying attention to the mainstream media by the late 1980’s.

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