In 1957 the BBC showed spaghetti growing on Swiss trees

On April 1, 1957, the BBC's current-affairs program Panorama showed a three-minute film about a family in Ticino, in southern Switzerland, bringing in the spaghetti harvest. The winter had been mild, the report said, and the spaghetti weevil had all but disappeared, so the crop was a big one. The film showed the harvest festival, and it talked about the breeding it had taken to get a strain of tree that grew spaghetti to the perfect length.

The idea came from the cameraman, Charles de Jaeger. At his school in Austria, a teacher had told the boys they were so stupid they would believe him "if I told you that spaghetti grew on trees." Panorama's editor, Michael Peacock, approved the idea and gave de Jaeger a budget of £100.

De Jaeger shot the film in March at Castagnola, on Lake Lugano. Some scenes were filmed back in England, at a pasta factory in St Albans. The commentary was read by Richard Dimbleby, a respected BBC broadcaster. Peacock said years later that Dimbleby knew they were using his authority to make the joke work, and that he loved the idea.

About 7 million of Britain's 15.8 million homes had a television set then, and an estimated 8 million people watched. Many of them believed it. Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain. Most people knew spaghetti as something that came in a tin, in tomato sauce, and many thought of it as an exotic delicacy.

The next day hundreds of people phoned the BBC. Some wanted to know whether the story was true. Others asked how they could grow a spaghetti tree of their own. The BBC told them to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

The newspapers split over whether it had been "a great joke or a terrible hoax on the public." Decades later, CNN called it the biggest hoax that any reputable news organization had ever pulled.