Switzerland has been keeping a little secret from us: they grow spaghetti. On trees. During the spring of 1957, the crop was especially fertile. The pasta strands hung there like any apple or pear would, and farmers reaped the noodly harvest. Now, if only they could get their act together on a meatball bush. We linked to this back in April of 2007, but the BBC investigative report on spaghetti farming was a little difficult to navigate. Here it is, easy peasy, after the jump.... More

BANG, BANG, BANG! That's the sound cleanliness makes! The Kitchen Gun is just like any normal gun (dangerous, makes loud noises, could kill people) except it also turns a dirty, grungy sink into a sparkly surface (with bullet holes, mind you). This silly commercial appeared on the BBC sketch comedy show, The Peter Serafinowicz Show. Video, after the jump.... More

Times restaurant critic Giles Coren, on his experience being chosen by the BBC to dress, drink and eat like an Edwardian gentleman for an entire week: There can have been no better time for a chap like me to be alive. So what an enormous stroke of luck that the BBC were looking for someone to send back to that very era — to live, dress, exercise, eat and drink like an Edwardian man of means — to find out what it did to his girth, his arteries, his inner organs, his digestion, his mood, his very soul. Some guinea pigs might have been daunted by the prospect of four whopping meals a day, rivers of grog and hardly... More

One of the greatest April Fools pranks of all time was pulled in 1957 by the BBC, of all institutions. Aired as an ordinary episode of the renowned series Panorama, it purported to be a documentary about "a family from Ticino in Switzerland carrying out their annual spaghetti harvest. It showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry." It sounds ridiculous now, sure, but back then many people had either never heard of spaghetti or had only ever had it from cans, and the episode was shot in a completely straightforward fashion and narrated by the respected journalist Richard Dimbleby. Hundreds of people called the BBC to ask where... More