April Cool

The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware that spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water.

Watching it shivering in Blighty this morning, the line "it isn't only in Britain this year that spring has taken everyone by surprise" sounds more unlikely than spaghetti trees frankly.