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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26831 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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The BBC convinced the British public that spaghetti grew on trees.

Wow this is real. Truly a modern marvel.

This is an example of not understanding the past. How could people be so stupid as to not know where spaghetti comes from?

Well if you don't eat spaghetti, it's not a common dish in any restaurant in your area, you haven't gone on foreign holidays, and all you know is the name of it as a food from abroad, how do you know where it comes from or how it's made? You don't care about it so you don't go to the bother of finding out "what is spaghetti and how is it made", all you've ever seen of it might be a packet of it on a shop shelf.

And this is the BBC, with the gravitas of its history behind it as the Reithian project to "to educate, inform and entertain" the public. You would no more expect a joke item on the Serious Current Affairs Programme than modern Americans would expect an Oscars musical number in the middle of the State of the Union address:

Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the story after remembering how teachers at his school in Austria teased his classmates for being so stupid that if they were told that spaghetti grew on trees, they would believe it. The editor of Panorama, Michael Peacock, told the BBC in 2014 how he gave de Jaeger a budget of £100 and sent him off. The report was made more believable through its voice-over by respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby. Peacock said Dimbleby knew they were using his authority to make the joke work, and that Dimbleby loved the idea and went at it eagerly.

In an American context, imagine Walter Cronkite presenting a similar story.

It wasn't everybody, "hundreds" out of an audience of millions, which is probably reasonable to expect regarding general levels of public credulousness:

At the time, 7 million of the 15.8 million homes (about 44%) in Britain had television receivers. Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and it was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and considered by many to be an exotic delicacy. An estimated eight million people watched the programme on 1 April 1957, and hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees; the BBC told them to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best".

Right now, there's probably some exotic foodstuff that in ten years will be introduced to us in the West, but which right now we're unfamiliar with, and if a trusted source (probably AI, the way things are going) said "this food item is harvested by pixies after being fertilised with unicorn dung", we'd fall for it. Hell, we're probably already falling for AI generated slop as evidenced by the posts above re: the Tim Walz fake quote.

Ok fair, I have a history degree I should have known. I guess the recent past is harder for me to grok than the ancient past sometimes.

That's the trap we all fall into. We have some vague notion that a hundred or five hundred years ago, things weren't the same as they are now (though modern adaptations of classic works do seem to be trying their hardest to persuade us all that Regency Englishmen and women behaved just like late 20th century/early 21st century people. Ditto for genre/historical novels where the heroes, but more usually the heroines, have all the values of 21st century liberals around everything from race to sex, and the villains of course have the values of their time).

But when it comes to thirty/forty/fifty years ago, we think that's close enough that things were Just Like Now, and we forget how much social change happens in quite a little time.

EDIT: Don't be too hard on yourself, I'm old enough that I've lived through the change from "garlic is a rare, foreign, and untrusted ingredient that is not suitable for our plain but wholesome national cookery" to "now we have three new sushi joints started up in the town" 😁

This is more of a reflection on the British public than the BBC.

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