April Fools Jokes back in 1957

From Daniele Longo, I got the following story, and the cool video… 

One of the great April Fool jokes took place on April 1st, 1957. The BBC TV programme Panorama did a documentary on ‘spaghetti farmers’ growing ‘spaghetti trees.’ The hoax Panorama programme featured a family from Ticino in Switzerland carrying out their annual spaghetti harvest. It showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry. 

The joke was an enormous success. Hundreds of people believed there was such things as spaghetti trees. Soon after the broadcast ended, the BBC began to receive hundreds of calls from puzzled viewers. Did spaghetti really grow on trees, they wanted to know. Others were eager to learn how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC reportedly replied that they should “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.” 🙂

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