Spaghetti
Situated in the BBC television schedule between the first episode of a new series of Hancock’s Half-Hour (1956–1960) and coverage of an international boxing match, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama (1953–) began in ordinary fashion at 8:30 p.m. on Monday 1 April 1957. At that time, each episode of Panorama covered a number of topical items in a magazine format, and since it was broadcast live and was not telerecorded, only two pre-filmed items remain in the BBC’s archive. One of these is a short location-based report on life in a village in the Ticino region of Switzerland. In the report, the distinctive voice of Panorama presenter Richard Dimbleby describes the mild winter recently experienced in the area, the early arrival of spring and the concomitantly premature, but welcome, appearance of ‘bees and blossoms’ to the village. So far, so (apparently) factual.
However, things take a surprising turn with Dimbleby’s question, ‘But what has this got to do with food?’ This is answered by the jovial trill of a zither, which up to this point has remained firmly in the background of the report’s soundtrack, and a cut from a close-up of tree blossoms to a wide shot of another tree, leaden with long, white strands of what Dimbleby’s narration identifies as an ‘exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop’. The second half of the report then follows a family of spaghetti farmers as they pick and dry the spaghetti ready for international export. The use of maps, diagrams and what appears to be authentic library footage of birds, bees and blossoms underpin the report with a factual foundation and Dimbleby’s description of ‘the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil’ and the ‘many years of patient endeavour by plant breeders’ to generate a spaghetti crop of uniform length is delivered in what Richard Lindley has called Dimbleby’s ‘usual genial, authoritative and helpfully informative style’ (2002: 50).
Dimbleby’s presence is vital to the segment’s effectiveness as an elaborate practical joke, and the narration itself was explicitly praised by Leonard Miall, Head of Talks, as a key part of the segment’s success.1 The BBC’s public service remit was also exploited to great effect, courting Panorama’s presumed audience of politically, socially and culturally engaged viewers. Nowhere is this clearer than when the narration compares Swiss and Italian modes of spaghetti production, suggesting that ‘many of you, I’m sure, will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valley’. Of course, viewers would have seen no such thing; they do not exist. However, Dimbleby’s invitation to participate in the verification process may have been too much for some viewers to resist.
One should try and avoid the trap of characterising historical viewers of television as being more naïve than those of today’s programmes, or, indeed, in the suggestion that audio-visual hybridity would have been inherently unfamiliar. It may be the case that hybrid forms are more numerous in the twenty-first century, but the production folders in the BBC’s Written Archive Centre show that a number of viewers clearly understood Panorama’s joke, and in various ways attempted to participate in it. One document provides a summary of telegram messages sent by viewers to Dimbleby . These messages include a faux-complaint about exploitative working practices—‘Protesting to my union BBC publisizing [sic] unsporting Swiss Picking Spaghetti in close season’—and another viewer’s concerns that they’d got the facts wrong: ‘What nonsense. Everyone knows Spaghetti is a root crop grown in radio holes drilled to length by trained worms.’2 However, the same document also acknowledges the apparent scarcity of such feedback, and a handwritten note appended to the bottom of the typed document—‘Thank God there are still some people who can see a joke’—suggests that most responses seem to have taken the report at face value.
Although the episode itself does not exist in its entirety, the draft script does. From this we can see that ‘Swiss Spaghetti Harvest’ was the last item of the show, inhabiting what has become the customary ‘and finally’ novelty slot in the news flow. It was also followed by Dimbleby’s closing address to viewers, ‘And there we end “Panorama” on this first day of April. Good-night’, a clear invitation to viewers to revise their views of the segment. Coming at the end of an otherwise serious programme which also contained straightforwardly factual items on the release from exile of the controversial Cypriot politician Makarios III, a royal gala performance of the film Yangtse Incident: The Story of H.M.S. Amethyst (1957), an in-studio wine tasting and a film from Poland by Christopher Chataway, the item reached an audience for whom—according to a BBC statement made later that evening—spaghetti may have been ‘considered […] an exotic delicacy’ (Sutherland 2009: 10). The replication of the grammar of television journalism lends the report a strong element of credibility, and the straight-laced nature of the film meant that even with Dimbleby’s interjection, for many viewers, the date—and thus the April Fool’s joke—was overlooked; for a few minutes it appeared as if spaghetti really did grow on trees.
This is a book about the mockumentary, and more specifically about mockumentary comedy. It concerns those fictional media texts which make it their job to imitate the aesthetics and stylistic conventions of documentary and other forms of factual media for comic ends and suggests that paying close attention to the mechanics of comedy through detailed textual analysis reveals the form’s critical and reflexive nature. It is an important contention of the book that this reflexivity is not always a primary or even explicit concern of these popular texts. Instead, the argument put forward here is that mockumentary comedy’s primary purpose is to make people laugh, and that it achieves this through strategies of comic performance; by the actors/performers who appear in mockumentaries, but also by the texts’ performance of factual media’s stylistic conventions. In doing so it cannot help but be reflexive in relation to both its subject matter and the documentary form from which it gets its stylistic inspiration.
Despite its short three-minute duration, ‘Swiss Spaghetti Harvest’ (as the Panorama segment will be referred to from now on) is a fascinating example of mockumentary comedy. It demonstrates the ways in which a fundamentally comic item, on the surface little more than an elaborate audio-visual joke, is actually undertaking something far more challenging. Viewers were taken in by the hoax, and many complained that Panorama’s status as a trusted current affairs programme made it an unsuitable vehicle for such a joke. Although it is surely not the case that the primary intention of those responsible for the item was to destabilise the audience’s faith in the BBC’s factual programming at a general level, this does appear to have been a secondary (if relatively minor) effect, if the reminiscences of viewers collected for the BBC’s website are to be believed (Anon 2005).
‘Swiss Spaghetti Harvest’ demonstrated the ease with which factual modes of broadcasting could be imitated for comic ends. In doing so it made the audience recognise, even if only through implication, that the aesthetics of factuality are imitable, malleable and unstable. The aesthetic elements that commonly make up factual media are very recognisable and include (but are not limited to) talking head interviews, hand-held improvised camera movements, ‘voice of God’ narration (Corner 1996: 30), the presence of a presenter and archival audio-visual material (footage, documents, photographs etc.). John Parris Springer and Gary D. Rhodes call these components ‘“false” signifiers of reality’ (2006: 8) because they do not guarantee truthfulness. They ‘signify’ reality because they have become associated with documentary and factual forms where they are most frequently found. However, they are ‘false’ signifiers because they can be easily imitated, fabricated or falsified. As documentary filmmaker Errol Morris once claimed, ‘[t]ruth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. It isn’t guaranteed by anything’ (Bates 1989: 17), and so using the aesthetic qualities of factual media ...