April Fools <\/b><\/p>\n
One of the most elaborate hoaxes in broadcast history was an April Fool\u2019s joke played on the British Broadcasting Corporation\u2019s current affairs program Panorama, with its rather dignified host Richard Dimbleby earnestly relating a story about the annual spaghetti harvest filmed in a Swiss-Italian spaghetti orchard. Cameraman Charles de Jaeger thought up the spoof and related to Denis Norden how it was accomplished.<\/p>\n
\u201cPanorama\u2019s first famous spaghetti harvest came from my school days in Austria,\u201d de Jaeger said, \u201cwhen a master was always saying to us, \u2018You\u2019re so stupid you\u2019d think spaghetti grew on trees.\u2019 So it had always been in my mind to do the story and I tried for several years. It was not until I was working on Panorama that I got the go-ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to the Swiss Tourist Office, who said they would help, and I flew to Lugano. It was in March when I thought the weather would be sunny with flowers out. There was a mist over the whole area.<\/p>\n
The tourist office guy took me around all over the place; not one blossom out, no leaves out. It was now Tuesday and I could not find anything and said in desperation, \u2018What can be done?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThen we found this hotel in Castiglione, which had laurel trees with leaves on, tall trees. So I said, \u2018We\u2019ll do it here. Let\u2019s go down into Lugano and get some handmade spaghetti.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did that, put the strands of spaghetti in a big wooden platter, took that in the car and we drove back. By the time we got there, the damn things wouldn\u2019t hang up. They\u2019d dried out. Se we cooked them, tried to put them on the trees, and this time they fell off because they were so slippery.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen this tourist guy had a brilliant idea\u2014put the spaghetti between damp cloths. That worked and we got local girls to hang them up\u2014about ten pounds\u2019 worth. Then we got the girls into national costume and filmed them climbing on ladders with these baskets, filling them up, and laying them out in the sun. And we said in the script, with a guitar playing in the background, \u2018We have this marvelous festival. The first harvest of the spaghetti.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the three-minute film Richard Dimbleby said, \u2018Now we say goodnight to this first day of April.\u2019 In spite of that hint, next morning it was surprising the number of people who didn\u2019t recognize that the spaghetti harvest was a hoax.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter Hay, Canned Laughter, Oxford University Press, Bits & Pieces, March 30, 1995, pp. 19-21<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
April Fools One of the most elaborate hoaxes in broadcast history was an April Fool\u2019s joke played on the British Broadcasting Corporation\u2019s current affairs program Panorama, with its rather dignified host Richard Dimbleby earnestly relating a story about the annual spaghetti harvest filmed in a Swiss-Italian spaghetti orchard. Cameraman Charles de Jaeger thought up the … Continue reading “Hoax”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}