Britain's bad news. I'm Jason Horton.

I'm Rebecca Leib.

And this is Ghost Town.

Well, it's simply that the past winter, one of the mildest in living memory,

has had its effect in other ways as well.

Most important of all, it's resulted in an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop.

The popular BBC show Panorama broadcasted a segment on April 1, 1957.

It began with romantic Italian music playing while the camera tilted upward into the sky

of a lush rural springtime in Switzerland.

Trees blossoming, laundry laid out on a balcony in the sunlight.

The narrator, Richard Dimbleby, kind of a David Attenborough of the time,

begins, quote,

it isn't only in Britain that spring this year has taken everyone by surprise.

And it did, truly.

This broadcast, as innocuous as it seemed,

became one of the most famous and ridiculous hoaxes in all of BBC history.

Today, we're making a meal, sorry, of the BBC's spaghetti tree hoax.

The segment was produced in an incredibly straightforward way,

presenting a family in southern Switzerland who keeps spaghetti trees and harvest them when

the tree is ready. It's in pretty grainy, black and white footage.

If there's no VO, you'd think it was maybe like a wheat being willow tree or something.

The voiceover recounts a harvesting as, quote,

...