Pop History Moment: The Greatest Ever April Fool's Joke

On this day in 1957 the BBC's prestigious and respected current affairs programme Panorama decided to risk a measure of its journalistic prestige and respect in the name of that most favoured of British pastimes - namely, taking the piss...

Probably the greatest April Fools' Day joke in the history of media - itself the brainchild of BBC camera operator Charles de Jaeger - the report on that year's bumper crop of spaghetti narrated by Richard Dimbleby was watched by as many as 8 million, and seems to have fooled quite a fair number of them. Of course, it helps that spaghetti was then an exotic food in the UK, most frequently found in tins.

Some of the accompanying footage was shot at a factory in London, some in nearby St. Albans, and the rest at a hotel in the Swiss resort town of Castiglione.
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