The Spaghetti-Tree Hoax — the BBC told eight million Britons pasta grew on trees, and they believed it

On the evening of 1 April 1957, the BBC current-affairs flagship Panorama broadcast a three-minute film, narrated by the broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, showing a family in the Swiss canton of Ticino plucking strands of spaghetti from the branches of trees and laying them in baskets to dry. It was an April Fools’ Day fabrication conceived by a BBC cameraman, Charles de Jaeger, and produced on a budget of roughly £100. Spaghetti does not grow on trees. The “harvest” was dried pasta draped over branches at a hotel in Castagnola, with additional footage staged at a pasta factory in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Within a day the BBC was acknowledging the segment as a joke.

The film reached an audience estimated at eight million in a country where, in 1957, pasta was an unfamiliar delicacy rather than a pantry staple, and where Panorama and Dimbleby carried immense institutional authority. The segment explained the bumper crop as the product of a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” and noted that growers bred their plants for uniform strand length. Hundreds of viewers telephoned the BBC the following day — some indignant, but many sincerely asking how they might grow a spaghetti tree of their own. The corporation reportedly advised them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

Unlike most entries in this file, the Spaghetti-Tree Hoax injured no one and was never meant to last beyond the joke. It is remembered not as a fraud but as a benchmark: the moment a respected news institution proved that authoritative narration and moving pictures could persuade a mass audience of something botanically impossible. Decades later CNN called it “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.”

The lasting interest of the case lies in why the joke worked at all. It exploited a precise gap between the audience’s trust in the medium and its knowledge of the subject. Britons knew Dimbleby and they knew Panorama; what most of them did not know was how spaghetti was actually made. Into that gap a plausible-sounding film could pour almost any nonsense, provided it was delivered in the sober register of the early-evening news.