Spaghetti
Situated in the BBC television schedule between the first episode of a new series of Hancockâs Half-Hour (1956â1960) and coverage of an international boxing match, the BBCâs flagship current affairs programme Panorama (1953â) 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 BBCâs 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 âbees and blossomsâ to the village. So far, so (apparently) factual.
However, things take a surprising turn with Dimblebyâs question, âBut what has this got to do with food?â This is answered by the jovial trill of a zither, which up to this point has remained firmly in the background of the reportâs 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 Dimblebyâs narration identifies as an âexceptionally heavy spaghetti cropâ. 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 Dimblebyâs description of âthe virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevilâ and the âmany years of patient endeavour by plant breedersâ to generate a spaghetti crop of uniform length is delivered in what Richard Lindley has called Dimblebyâs âusual genial, authoritative and helpfully informative styleâ (2002: 50).
Dimblebyâs presence is vital to the segmentâs 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 segmentâs success.1 The BBCâs public service remit was also exploited to great effect, courting Panoramaâs 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 âmany of you, Iâm sure, will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valleyâ. Of course, viewers would have seen no such thing; they do not exist. However, Dimblebyâs 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 naĂŻve than those of todayâs 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 BBCâs Written Archive Centre show that a number of viewers clearly understood Panoramaâs 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 practicesââProtesting to my union BBC publisizing [sic] unsporting Swiss Picking Spaghetti in close seasonââand another viewerâs concerns that theyâd got the facts wrong: âWhat nonsense. Everyone knows Spaghetti is a root crop grown in radio holes drilled to length by trained worms.â2 However, the same document also acknowledges the apparent scarcity of such feedback, and a handwritten note appended to the bottom of the typed documentââThank God there are still some people who can see a jokeââsuggests 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 âSwiss Spaghetti Harvestâ was the last item of the show, inhabiting what has become the customary âand finallyâ novelty slot in the news flow. It was also followed by Dimblebyâs closing address to viewers, âAnd there we end âPanoramaâ on this first day of April. Good-nightâ, 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 whomâaccording to a BBC statement made later that eveningâspaghetti may have been âconsidered [âŠ] an exotic delicacyâ (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 Dimblebyâs interjection, for many viewers, the dateâand thus the April Foolâs jokeâwas 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 formâs 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 comedyâs 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 textsâ performance of factual mediaâs 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, âSwiss Spaghetti Harvestâ (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 Panoramaâs 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 audienceâs faith in the BBCâs 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 BBCâs website are to be believed (Anon 2005).
âSwiss Spaghetti Harvestâ 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, âvoice of Godâ 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 ââfalseâ signifiers of realityâ (2006: 8) because they do not guarantee truthfulness. They âsignifyâ reality because they have become associated with documentary and factual forms where they are most frequently found. However, they are âfalseâ signifiers because they can be easily imitated, fabricated or falsified. As documentary filmmaker Errol Morris once claimed, â[t]ruth isnât guaranteed by style or expression. It isnât guaranteed by anythingâ (Bates 1989: 17), and so using the aesthetic qualities of factual media ...