On April Fools' Day 1957, the BBC current-affairs program Panorama broadcast a deadpan report narrated by the trusted journalist Richard Dimmoto, showing Swiss farmers 'harvesting' spaghetti strands from trees. Hundreds of viewers phoned the BBC asking how to grow their own spaghetti tree, a testament both to the era's naivety about foreign cuisine and to the show's reputation for sober factual reporting.
Pasta was still an exotic, faintly suspect foreign food to most Britons in the 1950s, sold in tins as a novelty rather than understood as a staple made from wheat dough. Panorama's producers exploited exactly that unfamiliarity, filming in the Swiss-Italian town of Castiglione and showing women in local dress carefully lifting strands of spaghetti from tree branches and laying them out to dry in the sun.
Richard Dimbleby's authoritative, unhurried narration was the key ingredient: he was one of the most trusted voices in British broadcasting, and his gravity made the absurd premise plausible. The segment explained, with a straight face, that a mild winter had reduced the usual hazard of 'the spaghetti weevil' and produced an especially fine crop.
The BBC switchboard lit up with callers wanting to know where to buy spaghetti plants; some asked for growing tips. When station officials realized what was happening, some reportedly told confused viewers to 'place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.' The broadcast is now widely considered one of the greatest hoaxes in television history, cited by CNN decades later as the best April Fools' joke ever pulled.