On 1 April 1957, the BBC current affairs programme Panorama presented a three-minute documentary item showing a Swiss family, in the southern canton of Ticino, gathering spaghetti from a line of trees in their garden. Such was the lack of familiarity in Britain with a household staple of millions of “foreigners”, and so authoritative were the dulcet tones of Richard Dimbleby, that an astonishing number of viewers were taken in. The BBC received hundreds of calls asking for details of how to grow a spaghetti tree – the advice, apparently, was to take a cutting (a length of dried spaghetti) and start it off by rooting it in a tin of Heinz tomato sauce.