Word: quiz
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...supposed to guess, but its members are prompted before air time with questions calculated to produce the funny double entendre. When Trust your Wife used celebrities as contestants, they were guaranteed a fee regardless of whether they won. "Of course," says a Hollywood agent who gets requests from quiz shows for celebrities, "they don't ask anything that will make a big name look stupid." Strike It Rich insures itself on that score by rehearsing some questions with its guests...
...veteran of such shows, "you have 70% or 80% control of what happens." The technique is simple: "To keep a contestant winning, all you have to do is figure out how not to hit a question he doesn't know. That's the basis of all quiz shows." The producers hand-pick their contestants for personality, occupation and geographical spread as well as specialized knowledge, then arm themselves with a shrewd, thorough insight into the contestant's strength and weakness, and have full control of the questions he will be asked...
Only rarely do quiz producers get caught in indiscretions. The Big Surprise is being sued by Showgirl Dale Logue, who complains that she was deliberately fed a question that defeated her for $10,000. It was the same question, she says, that she muffed during a "warmup session" before the show. In their growing desperation to check falling ratings that have knocked six quiz-panel shows off the air since October, the programs may be taking greater risks, especially in trying to woo celebrities as contestants. Showman Nils T. Granlund, who won $10,000 from The Big Surprise on "extremely...
...their mastery of the situation, the quiz producers seem helpless before the major ailment afflicting their shows. The sum of $64.000 no longer inspires audience awe. Viewers have become so blase that the producers arbitrarily changed their rules to enable Schoolboy Strom to win as much as $256,000, and devised new rules to let Clerk Nadler keep winning too. More important, a kind of inflation has also hit the contestants: instead of the kind of ordinary people who struck a responsive chord in viewers, they now run to narrow specialists and photographic minds-"freaks," as the trade calls them...
LINCOLN'S COMMANDO, by Ralph J. Roske and Charles Van Doren (3 1 0 pp.; Harper; $4.50), is notable as the work of Adult Quiz Kid Van Doren (TIME, Feb. 11, et seq.), a cerebral type who chose as his subject a man of flamboyant contrast. The man: Commander Will Cushing, U.S.N., whose raids up and down the Confederate-held coasts during the second half of the Civil War were the despair of Rebel defenders. Cushing was young and handsome, a braggart as well as an incredibly brave man. His superiors feared his escapades nearly as much...