A still from the BBC report about the “spaghetti tree”, broadcast in 1957

This instalment of Only Connect is appearing on All Fool’s Day. On this day, it is customary for newspapers to carry hoax news in its columns, such as the discovery of life in outer space or the revelation that Bill Gates is a woman. No doubt today’s The Telegraph will also rise suitably to the occasion, and startle its readers with the assertion that Rakhi Sawant is going to star in the next Steven Spielberg film, or that a mountain peak higher than Everest has been discovered.

In the West, radio and television too are enthusiastic perpetrators of April Fool hoaxes. One of the most famous hoaxes was a three-minute TV report by the BBC in 1957 about the discovery of a spaghetti tree, which actually showed a woman plucking spaghetti from a tree. The prank was thought up by a BBC cameraman who had been ridiculed at school by a teacher for being stupid enough to believe that spaghetti grew on trees. An estimated seven million families watched the programme, and there were hundreds of enquiries about how to grow the tree. Not a bad way to get back at unfeeling and unimaginative educators!

Indian radio and TV however have been rather coy about pulling pranks on its audience. Perhaps the explanation is that both media were state-controlled when they came into being, and that our sarkar is not exactly known for its sense of humour. Imagine the furore if the gravitas of an All India Radio newscast was interrupted with the intelligence that the government had legalised marijuana, or that Sunil Gavaskar was actually a robot designed by the DRDO, which played a forward defensive stroke instead of firing bazookas due to a design malfunction. Imagine the PILs, questions in Zero Hour, the dharnas, the hunger strikes which would follow.

Or imagine what would happen if someone like Orson Welles decided to pull a fast one on the nation. This did not happen on an April Fool’s Day, but on October 30, 1938. On the occasion of Halloween, CBS radio aired an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel, The War Of The Worlds. Directed by Orson Welles, the first half of the hour-long broadcast was presented as a series of breaking news bulletins about a Martian invasion of earth. So convincing was the programme that thousands began to flee their homes. According to a calculation, some six million heard the broadcast, 1.7 million believed it to be true, and 1.2 million were ‘genuinely frightened’. Remember, this was just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, and war fear was already in the air. Even Hitler is said to have commented on the episode, citing it as an evidence of the “decadence and corrupt condition of democracy”. A full recording of the broadcast is available at www.archive.org/details/WAROFTHEWORLDS2.

The author teaches English at Jadavpur University