What was the name of the BBC's 1957 hoax about spaghetti growing on trees?

The BBC’s 1957 hoax about spaghetti growing on trees was called the spaghetti-tree hoax.

The prank was broadcast on Panorama on April 1, 1957. Its report presented a fictional harvest in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where a family supposedly gathered strands of spaghetti from trees after a mild winter and the eradication of the imaginary spaghetti weevil.

The story was designed for an audience that knew relatively little about pasta. In 1950s Britain, spaghetti was often associated with tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce rather than with everyday Italian cooking. Many viewers therefore accepted the carefully filmed report as a genuine piece of agricultural news.

The footage was partly filmed at a pasta factory in St Albans and partly in Switzerland. The BBC received hundreds of calls from people asking how to cultivate spaghetti trees. “Italian noodle tree” and “spaghetti harvest” describe elements of the joke, but neither is its established name.