Did I ever tell you about the time I was on a quiz show?
I was the newest employee at my job, so I got last pick of vacation dates. I ended up with the third and fourth week of November. The weather was still pretty good, and Mimi and I took day trips into New York City – seeing a play, hitting the museums, wandering around taking in the sights while favoring the sights that were free. When we got to Rockefeller Plaza, we took the tour of NBC’s Radio City Studios, where we saw a taping of the game show Play Your Hunch. I’ll let Mark Evanier’s “TV relic” site, oldtvtickets.com (worth a visit) explain how the show worked. Thanks, Mark.
“Merv Griffin hosted for most of the run, and the show was pretty simple. Two teams of contestants (usually husband-wife) would be shown little puzzles, usually involving three people coming out on stage or three objects being unveiled. The correct answer to the question would be one of the three choices, which were labelled X, Y and Z. If you guessed right, you got points. That was it.”
After the taping, they invited anyone who wanted to be on the show and would be in town the next week to stick around. The next week was Thanksgiving, so not too many people stayed. Our interviewer liked us, and said to come back ready to play on Monday.
The show was broadcast in color, and male contestants were “strongly encouraged” to wear blue shirts, not white, because white sometimes confused early color cameras. I didn’t own a blue shirt, so before we left the building we visited the upscale shoppes on the first level. A camera-ready light-blue shirt was $30, about $25 more than I was used to paying, but we saw it as an investment.
On Monday, we chatted with the other contestants in the hour or so before the show. The first couple we would play against were a pleasant brother and sister from Australia, traveling the world as a gift from their father.
Another pair of contestants was a country clodhopper and his wife, in the city for the first time. They had tickets for the musical Purlie Victorious, where “Purlie” is the lead character, and the wife was quite excited. Her husband kept calling it “PURELY Victorious”, what a rube. I mean, I’m from New Jersey, so I don’t have anything to brag about, but at least I crack a newspaper.
Before the show, Mimi and I got to meet some of the celebrities who would present the “problems”, as the show’s puzzles/games were called. Among them was Mitch Miller, who was later instantly recognized by our one-year-old watching at home (“Mehh Mrrrr!”, according to his grandmother). We also met Minnie Pearl of the price-tagged bonnet (“Howw-deeee!”), and shy science teacher “Mister Peepers” Wally Cox, who seemed to share a mutual attraction with Mimi.
As the show begins, host Merv chats a bit with the contestants. I’m not good at small talk, but Mimi covers for me nicely. I think Merv made a little dig about our chat imbalance, but maybe I’m too sensitive.
The contestants played their hunches, solving puzzles such as which of three students crossing the stage wearing graduation robes and oversized placards identifying them as student X, Y, or Z is transporting a stack of books between his knees. Yes, it was dumb.
Wally secret-signaled Mimi that the Swedish word “blyertspenna”, a word he enjoyed repeating, meant “pencil”, so we won that round.
We sailed along pretty well, but all good things must come to an end, and on the third day we were defeated by “Purely Victorious” and his smarter wife.
In the two years before Play Your Hunch first went on the air, a number of scandals revealed that some game shows were rigged.
The revelations eroded public trust and ended an era of prizes that for some shows could exceed $100,000. Play Your Hunch was never intended to be a big-money show, and for our run we took home $375, about four months’ apartment rent, so not too shabby.
No one foresaw the Game Show Network getting rich off reruns of old quiz shows, so the shows often reused their tapes, writing over earlier episodes again and again – what a loss. A few Play Your Hunch episodes have survived, making it to YouTube or a DVD collection, but apparently none of the ones we starred in. I recently spent some time on YouTube looking so you wouldn’t have to, and saw:
• Three pretty young women wearing knee-length puffy dresses take the stage, and the puzzle is announced:
“ONE OF THESE WOMEN” (you have my attention)
“ISN’T” (isn’t what?)
“WEARING ANY” (I am giddy, oh please please please)
“STOCKINGS” (feh, what a disappointment)
After someone hunches a hunch, the women, one at a time, pull a pinch of stocking away from shapely calves, but one of them cannot, BECAUSE SHE ISN’T WEARING ANY.
• I get a twinge of nostalgia when on another show I see a model dangle as a prize my favorite piece of 1960s techno-candy, the “Polaroid Highlander Model 80A Instant Camera”.
• On another episode, Merv flirts outrageously with the one songwriter out of three who wrote that year’s big Elvis hit.
“As Seen on TV”
• We were seen by my Dugan’s Bakery customer Mr. Bryan, who owned a grocery store where routes 46 and 10 intersect, at Ledgewood Circle in far-off Succasunna, New Jersey.
• Tony Imperiale, a neighbor who formed the North Ward Citizens Committee to protect our section of Newark from “bad elements” and future looters, shouted “I saw you! I saw you!” and waved madly from behind the fish counter at Food Fair.
• Jack Moore, a cousin on my father’s side who jumped into Lake Mohawk to save three-year-old me after I fell off the dock, called from Texas to congratulate us and say we looked great.
We have more friends looking out for us than we realize.