Word: quiz
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...lipped Trumpeter Louis ("Satch-mo") Armstrong, who correctly named six out of seven melodies on a TV quiz show (his flub: the prelude to Act III of Lohengrin), happily sent his $800 prize to his old alma mater, New Orleans' Milne Municipal Home for Boys, where Satchmo was sent at 13 after he prankishly fired a pistol at the moon to celebrate New Year...
...networks and advertisers like TV parlor games because they are cheap. 20 Questions costs only a modest $3,500 a week. Quiz shows have no script cost, the same stage set can be used year in and year out, and the performers are far less expensive than big-name comedians or singers. But one sad discovery has tempered the networks' enthusiasm. Explains Robinson: "Except for the rare ones, quiz shows have a very definite audience ceiling...
Money & Prizes. The rarest of the rare ones is You Bet Your Life, a quiz show that is little more than an excuse for Groucho Marx, in his cheerful way, to insult six contestants a night. Other unemployed funnymen have tried in vain to duplicate Groucho's success. Fred Allen just does not seem right on NBC's Judge for Yourself, and Herb Shriner on CBS's Two for the Money is far from rivaling Groucho's hold on his audience. When the wit falters, quiz shows usually try to make up for it by giving...
What Future? Quiz show thinking has become so threadbare that the newest of the shows, ABC's Who's the Boss?, is virtually a carbon copy of the four-year-old What's My Line? In this program panelists are faced with the problem of guessing, not what the contestant (a private secretary) does, but what her boss does...
...general, the more money a quiz show gives away the less entertainment it offers. By this standard, Strike It Rich, Break the Bank and a dozen others rate even below daytime soap operas as adult amusement. Quiz shows, which currently make up about 20% of network programming, have been gradually dropping in popularity. Each summer the percentage makes a sudden rise as inexpensive quizzes are thrown into the breach left by vacationing winter shows, but few of them survive into the following season. One network executive may have been speaking for most of the industry when, asked what he thinks...