The 1994 movie "Quiz Show" so lovingly recreated the era. The movie opens with people in NYC rushing up out of the subway, women and men in hats, women wearing white gloves, all anxious to get home in time to prepare dinner and sit down and watch "Twenty-One," or "Tic-Tac-Dough." The country was in game show frenzy.
Popularity of game shows comes and goes, and they all have their life cycle. If anyone remembers "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" hosted not all that long ago by Regis Philbin on ABC, you can understand the fever. The show was on initially once a week, and quickly spread like a disease to three nights a week. Regis would kid his show saved ABC from financial ruin. He was probably right. All networks need a hit, and '"Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" was one.
And it wasn't just this country. The Australian series 'The Dcotor Blake Mysteries" on PBS is set in the 1950s, with Dr. Lucien Blake, a police surgeon, smartly dressed with a great looking hat and impeccable manners, acting as a police surgeon for the constabulary in Ballarat, Victoria, a town that sprung up during the gold rush of the 1850s.
Dr. Blake solves crimes through forensic analysis. His wife, an Asian, is presumed dead, someone he met in Malaya when he fought in WW II. His daughter is also presumed dead. His household is his deceased father's old house that he practiced in, he also a police surgeon. Living in the house is Jean, who was the father's receptionist and housekeeper. Jean is a widow, whose husband was killed in action in the WW II.
Maddie, a district nurse, also rooms in the house. Some episodes have one of the young male members of the Ballarat constabulary also living there as well. Meals are boarding house family style, cooked by Jean.
One episode has everyone excitedly gathering around the TV to watch the evening's game show. I don't know what the show was, but this is Australia in the 50s, and the period settings in the show are accurate. And that's what is was like everywhere. Game shows were popular all over the world.
The obituary that kicked off this wave of nostalgia was for Howard Felsher described as a "game show fixer" who has passed away at 90. I never heard of Mr. Felsher, but reading the obit you can see that he was a bit behind the curtain. He was a producer of the popular show Tic-Tac-Dough, a show that was just what it said, placing Xs and Os based on getting questions right. Think Hollywood Squares without the celebrities wising off.
"Game show fixer" doesn't mean someone who took a poor performing show and helped it along by making production changes and jazzing up the set. Although, Mr. Felsher did help goose the ratings by having the contestants fed the answers beforehand in order that the show might generate "excitement, tension, pace, drama, suspense." Make the show more popular.
There were two shows, a daily daytime show and a once a week nighttime prime time version. It was the prime time version that Mr. Felsher was boosting. And popular it became. But then the hearings came around that revealed the rigging. Mr. Felsher never thought what he did was terrible wrong, but he did lie about it to grand juries, and did coach contestants to lie under oath about knowing the answers ahead of time.
Mr. Felsher was never criminally charged, and later came back, somewhat like Nixon, and produced the highly successful show "Family Feud."
The damage to "Tic-Tac-Dough" was collateral to the absolute explosion that occurred to the show "Twenty-One" when contestants went on record admitting they had been fed answers, or even worse, went into the tank like a mob-controlled fighter and let their opponent win. The two shows had common producers.
This was news. This was bigger than U.S. Steel. In the 50s I remember the Kefauver hearings that dove into organized crime that were televised. It was in these televised hearings the godfather Frank Costello calmly toll the committee that, "I pay my taxes," lest anyone think he was Al Capone and could be had for income tax evasion. Frank was a business man. Frank was cool. As a kid my friend remembers having his father, a CBS producer, introduce him to Frank at Toots Shor's; just to say hello.
The lid came off the top when one one of the contestants, Herb Stempel, a wildly successful returning champion (think "Jeopardy's" Ken Jennings) revealed he went into the tank to let Charles Van Doren win. The disclosure came well after Herb purposely misnamed the Academy Award winning movie of 1955, mumbling out "On the Waterfront" rather than "Marty." Down goes Frazier.
This was 1956 and the earth shook. The show was rigged. Contestants placed in isolation booths by twin models, fitted with clumsy headphones were sweating and wiping their brows, all as part of an act. They had been fed the answers and were pretending extreme thought and outsized relief when they answered correctly.
The "Payola" scandal of radio disc jockeys getting pay for play hadn't yet hit the fan, but when it did, it was revealed to be a widespread practice all across the country in the 1950s. Dick Clark was perhaps the most recognizable figure in the scandal, but he, like Howard Felsher, survived and went on to other things in the media business.
It is almost provincial that congressional hearings of the era centered on game shows and choice of rock n' roll radio programming. We've come a long way baby.
Mr Felscher is seen in the accompanying photo adjusting the game board for "Tic-Tac-Dough" behind the scenes. It shows how mechanical things were then.
Mr. Stempel is still with us, at 91. He became the whistle-blower that shook the game show industry. He described the shenanigans in congressional testimony and in interviews. He expresses annoyance that he is seen as the culprit because he exposed Van Doren's and the show's dishonesty.
The show's producers had figured Herb had his run. The ratings were "plateauing" and they needed to introduce a fresh contestant/champion. Charles Van Doren had a pedigree. He wasn't a Jewish postal worker from Queens wearing black-rimmed glasses. He was connected to an eminent academic and literary family, and was himself an English professor at Columbia University. His father, Mark Van Doren, was a Pulitzer Prize-winner who also taught at Columbia. Charles Van Doren was getting the shot at the title.
The movie question proved crucial to the "downfall." Three tie games had been rigged in order to goose the ratings. And goosed they were. Listening to the questions you realize they were complex, multi-part questions that usually required the contestant to ask for the question to be repeated. They don't ask questions like that anymore.
Charles Van Doren is also still with us at 92. At a 1959 Senate committee hearing he apologized for his role in the scandal. Thus, all the obituaries surrounding the quiz show scandals have yet to be written. Who gets the bylines?
I remember watching "Twenty-One" with my father. After the scandal broke my father wondered out loud how someone knew the names of two obscure islands in the Pacific in Micronesia. I don't know if it was a Van Doren question, and I don't know what the question really was, but my father, who had served on Guam during WW II for the Corps of Engineers making maps from surveillance photos, expressed some after-the-fact surprise that anyone could name those two islands. At the time he didn't scream "rat" but it was starting to make sense.
The American bubble of fair play was broken by the scandal, and others that followed. When I used to watch "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" I always smelled a rat when it seemed too many people from a very affluent part of Nassau County were introduced in the Lightening Round, the rapid fire, finger clicking round that contestants had to get through in order to stay on the show. Things seemed skewed.
I always imagined the Manhattan DA's office was watching. I imagined I'd eventually hear that the producers would be caught selling access to the Lightening Round. It never happened, but my guess is people had friends in the right places.
"Tic-Tac-Dough" and "Twenty One" went on to other iterations, and without scandal. There are plenty of game shows today that one might think askance of, but there's probably little chance anything of real fraudulent consequence is going on.
The audience base is there. We love the shows.
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