In a similar vein to the o.p, about 7 or 8 years ago my Mrs (at the time a specialist witness interviewer) was asked to take part in a 3 part documentary on BBC called Eyewitness where a reconstruction of a crime would be witnessed by a group of volunteers who then went on to be interviewed as witnesses (I think you can still see bits on YouTube). She went on about it for months and about how much detail the programme had gone into, to the extent that they had detectives turn up and obtain first accounts, as would happen in real life.
To ensure realism she hadn’t seen any of the reconstruction footage when doing the interviews and almost a year after it was filmed it was to be broadcast so excitedly we settled down together to watch her moment of glory. Her family up and down the country had all been told to watch or record it..
Which I apparently ruined slightly by neglecting to tell her right up until the point that I appeared on screen, that I was one of the detectives who attended the scene of the “crime” 😀