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<text>
<title>
(1950s) Radio & Television:The Week in Review
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
January 16, 1956
Radio & Television: The Week in Review
</hdr>
<body>
<p> In default of entertainment, television last week was
giving away more money than ever before. CBS unveiled a new
giveaway, Do You Trust Your Wife?, a money-tosser that has
nearly as many M.C.s (Edgar Bergen and three of his dummies) as
it does contestants (three married couples). The show is filmed--and filmed badly. Large blisters of light kept glaring on and
off during the 30 minutes, seemingly timed to the excessive
applause of the well-trained studio audience. The winning
contestants: Robert and Roberta Hickey, parents of eleven
children, who won $100 a week for a year when Roberta proved
able to think of more states ending in "a" than either of her
rivals. This week the Hickeys will be given the chance of
competing for another $5,200.
</p>
<p> The $64,000 question, the Louis Cowan show with Emcee Hal
March, is miles ahead of its competitors both in audience
popularity and in the vital area of "human interest." Currently,
the show is starring Mabel Morris, an aged (she admits to 75),
sassy Dickensian expert who has intelligence, impressive
knowledge of her special field, and a fetching voice quaver not
unlike that of Ed Wynn. Newspaper reporters last week helped
along the show's publicity by revealing that Mabel is on relief
in Manhattan and that some $6,000 of her winnings will have to
go toward clearing up her indebtedness to the city.
</p>
<p> Other giveaway programs keep hoping that they will get to
the top, too, if they just scatter enough loot along the way.
NBC's The Big Surprise is still offering the biggest jackpot of
all ($100,000) and still failing to get a jackpot-sized
audience. CBS's Name That Tune has upped its ante to $25,000
without sensationally upping its rating, and ABC's Bert Parks
loudly claims some sort of primacy for having disbursed "more
than $5,000,000" over the years on Stop the Music and Break the
Bank (the "granddaddy of all giveaways'). Even a few non-
giveaway shows are elbowing into the act: ABC's Lawrence Welk
Show--which is usually devoted to sugary waltzes--last month
arranged for four lucky contestants to receive a new Dodge each
year for the rest of their lives.
</p>
<p> Other quiz-show producers have decided that money isn't
everything, and are putting their chips down on funnymen whose
questions to contestants are incidental to their jokes. Groucho
Marx has a commanding lead in this division. His closest rivals
are the venerable What's My Line?, I've Got a Secret (offering
three comics: Garry Moore, Bill Cullin, Henry Morgan), and Two
for the Money, which depends on the synthetic Hoosierisms of
Herb Shriner.
</p>
<p> At week's end, CBS--which already has twice as many quiz
shows as any other network--gave further evidence of its faith
in the potency of unrelated bits of knowledge by announcing the
revival of still another Louis Cowan show, Quiz Kids, with a
new set of child prodigies under the fatherly wing of Clifton
Fadiman, 51, who learned his trade on such question-and-answer
shows as Information Please, and This Is Show Business.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>