Yes, It Grows on Trees

Great days of television:

The Spaghetti Harvest: On April 1, 1957 the British news show, Panorama, broadcast a segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed to an unusually mild winter. The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched a rural Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets.

"The spaghetti harvest here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry," Dimbleby informed the audience. "Many of you, I'm sure," he continued, "will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valley. For the Swiss, however, it tends to be more of a family affair." The narration then continued in a tone of absolute seriousness: Another reason why this may be a bumper year lies in the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, the tiny creature whose depradations have caused much concern in the past."...

• The BBC has the original broadcast of the Panorama documentary available online in realvideo format. The realvideo player must be installed on your computer in order to view the broadcast.

Comments

[jerry]

I expect to see Powerline/Jarvis and the usual characters talking about this and how the MSM once again got it wrong.

[Ereshkigal]

April 1 is always a High Holy Day in our home. Now we'll have to add spaghetti to the list of ceremonial foods.

[Chuchundra]

Neat, but the video is near unwatchable.

[Derelict]

This was revived 30 years later as the San Giorgio spaghetti farm commercial.

Still, it's a classic and ranks right up there with Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast as fakery that fooled millions.

[Bob O]

Thanks.
Jack Paar aired this segment on this side of the Atlantic a few years later; I haven't seen it in at least 40 years. Who knew that one day it would be available on-demand?

[dilbert dogbert]

I heard Rich Little??? do the Nixon is ready to return on an NPR 1 April show. What a hoot! Fit, rested and tan.
As I remember it put a lot of peoples knickers in a twist.

[Dan]

Sometime in the 60's (if I remember right), an April 1st NBC Huntley-Brinkley Report had a riff on this about the pickle harvest, with people pulling pickles (hanging from strings) off the pickle trees. The acid soil in that location made for particularly good dill pickles.

Another year the same reporter (I wish I could remember his name) had a piece on submarine races in the Potomac, with shots of the river as the races were taking place.

[quixote]

In these degenerate times, I gather people are too offended at having been fooled for the news organizations to try anything this brilliant. Oh well. I guess the best that could be done is an April 1st broadcast about how the news these days never fools anyone.

[Gary Farber]

Oddly. (Museum first linked here.)

Sigh.

http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2005/07/once-upon-time-in-italy-spaghetti-now.html

http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2002/04/would-you-like-your-reality-augmented.html

[lash marks]

Oh, I think we hear the spaghetti tree almost every day in the media. How the
stock market is such a great bull, all
you have to do is decide which stocks
you want to make you rich. How the US
economy is back on boom times, and all
you have to do is decide which career
you want to make you rich. How real
estate won't ever see the top, and you
better put some earnest money down
quick, before someone tops your offer!

Unlike US elders, probably suffering
the long-term effects of drug abuse,
both hippie, disco and pharmaceutical,
our kids see quite clearly the world
of pushing spaghetti uphill they get.

That's why they prefer their cartoons,
hip-hop, and the mobile life of cells.