I’ve got some kind of a miserable chest cold that keeps coming and going.
It’s not COVID, but it’s been enough to knock me on my butt for several days. I thought I was over it, and it came roaring back with a vengeance.
So I’m pushing fluids, resting, and watching TV — on my computer, that is. Is there a word for watching TV on your computer, besides “streaming”? (I’m doing a lot of streaming, too … because of all of the fluids. Heigh-yo!)
It’s a cliche that for Gen X’ers like myself, when we stayed home sick from school, we watched “The Price is Right.” But lately, when I’m sick, I find myself instead indebted to whomever has uploaded to YouTube virtually every surviving episode of the 1950s and ’60s game show “What’s My Line?”
Most of them appear to have been taken from late-night reruns on what used to be called “Game Show Network,” and is now “GSN.” Contrary to popular belief, I’m not old enough to have seen “What’s My Line?” on TV between 1950 and 1967, and I never watched it on Game Show Network. To be honest, I’m not sure how I discovered it, but it’s become my TV comfort food.
The game play of “What’s My Line?” is simple. A four-member panel has to guess the occupation of a guest by asking only “yes” or “no” questions. They can get up to 10 wrong answers before losing. (Because it’s the 1950s, the stakes are pathetically low: The guests get only $5 per wrong answer, up to $50, or about $500 in today’s money. That wouldn’t even make a good prize on “Wheel of Fortune.” In many episodes, the guests wind up donating their money to a charity.)
The occupation is always revealed to the home audience before the panel begins guessing. (Lately, I’ve begun closing my eyes, so that I can play along with the panelists.)
Each episode also has at least one celebrity mystery guest, for whom the panelists are blindfolded. A 2010 blog post on Metafilter refers to the show as a “who’s-who of 1950s and ’60s celebrities,” and that’s accurate. Just some of the mystery guests included Julie Andrews, Fred Astaire, Harry Belafonte, Helen Gurley Brown, James Cagney, Sean Connery, Gary Cooper, Jacques Cousteau, Joan Crawford, Salvador Dalí, Sammy Davis Jr., Aretha Franklin, Jackie Gleason, Merv Griffin, Alfred Hitchcock, Lena Horne, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Ronald Reagan, Phil Rizzuto, Roy Rogers, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Frank Lloyd Wright!
In the episode I’ve posted here, from 1961, the mystery guest was Lucille Ball in one of several appearances; she also had appeared with her ex-husband, Desi Arnaz, on an earlier show.
The host for the entire 1950 to 1967 run was the extremely debonair John Charles Daly, who has a very unusual distinction: For about 10 years, while Daly was hosting “What’s My Line?” on CBS-TV, he was a vice president of news and a news commentator for ABC-TV. That would be like Lester Holt simultaneously hosting “Jeopardy!” (or “The Price is Right” for that matter).
Even more wild, Daly also occasionally filled in on NBC-TV’s “Today” show, which, as his Wikipedia entry points out, makes him one of the few American TV personalities of the ’50s and ’60s to have been seen at the same time on all three American broadcast networks. (To be honest, I’ll be darned if I can think of another one. Most TV personalities back then were strongly — if not exclusively — associated with only one company.)
Daly, incidentally, quit ABC in November 1960, after the network pre-empted election night coverage for a “Bugs Bunny” cartoon and an episode of “The Rifleman.”
“What’s My Line?” was a prime-time game show, aired Sunday nights on CBS, until 1967, when low ratings led the network to cancel the program. The show was brought back in a syndicated form — without Daly, who went onto work for Voice of America, and then public television — from 1968 to 1975.
There have been two attempts at reviving the show — one with Harry Anderson of “Night Court” and another with David Hasselhoff (!!!) — that didn’t get off the ground. Considering some of the muck that’s currently on broadcast TV, it’s hard to see why “What’s My Line?” was rejected.
Maybe it moves too slowly for today’s audiences. Even in the 1960s, there were complaints that the show’s stately formality — panelists are always addressed as “Mr. Cerf” or “Miss Killgallen,” Daly is never without a bow-tie, and everyone is unceasingly polite — was old-fashioned.
But when I don’t feel well or I just want to relax, old-fashioned and polite is just up my alley. In this episode, from the first week of January 1961, the first two guests have unusual names (those names don’t have anything to do with their mystery occupations) and guest panelist Shelley Berman is hilarious.
So now let’s all watch as Allstate presents America’s favorite guessing game …