0:00.0	Britain's bad news. I'm Jason Horton.
0:02.7	I'm Rebecca Leib.
0:03.7	And this is Ghost Town.
0:20.6	Well, it's simply that the past winter, one of the mildest in living memory,
0:24.6	has had its effect in other ways as well.
0:26.8	Most important of all, it's resulted in an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop.
0:31.5	The popular BBC show Panorama broadcasted a segment on April 1, 1957.
0:37.7	It began with romantic Italian music playing while the camera tilted upward into the sky
0:42.5	of a lush rural springtime in Switzerland.
0:46.2	Trees blossoming, laundry laid out on a balcony in the sunlight.
0:50.4	The narrator, Richard Dimbleby, kind of a David Attenborough of the time,
0:55.2	begins, quote,
0:56.8	it isn't only in Britain that spring this year has taken everyone by surprise.
1:01.2	And it did, truly.
1:02.7	This broadcast, as innocuous as it seemed,
1:05.6	became one of the most famous and ridiculous hoaxes in all of BBC history.
1:11.0	Today, we're making a meal, sorry, of the BBC's spaghetti tree hoax.
1:16.6	The segment was produced in an incredibly straightforward way,
1:19.6	presenting a family in southern Switzerland who keeps spaghetti trees and harvest them when
1:24.0	the tree is ready. It's in pretty grainy, black and white footage.
1:28.6	If there's no VO, you'd think it was maybe like a wheat being willow tree or something.
1:32.4	The voiceover recounts a harvesting as, quote,
	...

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