THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511100086
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E9 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
``P DQ.''
I was in a health club, watching four men cluster around a television broadcasting Jerry Springer's gossipy harangue of the day, when I thought of it. ``PDQ.''
``What is it that you would tell him now? . . . What is it that you would tell her?'' I heard Springer ask the apparently gorgeous, but dim-witted couple on the verge of an audience-hooting reconciliation. (The muscled guys were pulling for their alter ego on the screen to score.)
PDQ. ``Pretty darn quick.'' Hosted by veteran emcee Dennis James, ``PDQ'' was one of many TV game shows that my competitive child's mind absorbed in the 1960s. A mute contestant placed letter-tiles on a board, three at a time, while his talking partner tried to deduce the words they signified and the puzzle they composed - a saying, perhaps, or a person's name.
For example, the first word of a phrase might be suggested by T - R - H.
Possible guesses: triumph . . . trench . . . trash . . . truth. Bingo! TRUTH. Next up: I - S - S. ``Truth is s - ''; yes, it certainly is ``stranger than fiction.''
By the time the irrepressibly titillating Springer was asking mothers of drag queens how they felt about their sons' lifestyles - ``Do you think he's pretty?'' - I was thinking about game shows. Whatever happened to this innocent form of low-brow mass entertainment? (Low-brow by '60s standards, at least.) How did the game show manage to disappear? I'm not exactly sure, but its decline began when Phil Donahue proved that pandering to idle people's emotions was quite profitable. M - N - Y, honey.
Today's embarrassingly bad true confessionals, drawn out by hosts we know faux-intimately by their first names (Sally, Ricki, Geraldo, Montel), make the old game shows, even the nauseating ``The Newlywed Game,'' with Bob Eubanks, he of the heh-heh double-entendre glance, seem like wholesome, educational programming.
And TV was a wasteland then. Just ask Chuck Barris. Gong!
We've gone from frivolous, fun and sociable, to vicious, uncivil and shamelessly self-absorbed; from wordplay and cleverness to accusation and catharsis.
A tip for William Bennett and the daytime-TV trash-bashers: Forget boycotting the advertisers. Talk to Merv Griffin. Bring back the game show. We can only go up from here.
If not for silver fox Bob Barker's hourlong daytime ``Price Is Right'' - which I haven't watched since new cars retailed for $4,000 - and the two evening mainstays, ``The Wheel of Fortune''and the new ``Jeopardy!,'' the game show would be extinct.
This is quite a comedown from the days when each major network ran hours of back-to-back daytime game shows - the old ``Jeopardy!,'' ``Concentration,'' ``Eye Guess,'' ``Hollywood Squares,'' ``Password,'' ``You Don't Say,'' ``Let's Make a Deal,'' ``$10,000 Pyramid,'' ``The Match Game,'' etc., etc. Though aptitude beyond guesswork was minimal on some shows - ``Door No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3,'' for example - others tested puzzle-solving ability. When the puzzle was not obvious to the standard-issue 8-year-old, the potential for children (sometimes, adults) to improve analytical, memory and word skills existed.
About all the home-from-school 8-year-old learns from the likes of Jerry, Jenny, Ricki and even the protesting Oprah is ``He done her wrong'' so ``She done him wrong back.'' Hoot, hoot.
Allen Ludden's long-running ``Password'' taught antonyms, synonyms, word association; Hugh Downs' ``Concentration'' honed powers of recall; Tom Kennedy's ``You Don't Say,'' a charades-variant like ``PDQ,'' played up phonetics, syllables, words. Even the silly ``Match Game,'' Gene Rayburn's personal stand-up act, called on aptitude in personality.
(Never underestimate the power of television to imprint useless information, such as the names of game-show emcees, on the human brain.)
Not only could a child witness deductive reasoning through a question-and-answer process, but he or she could taste a bit of the sophisticated New York theater and literary life, with the likes of Broadway star Arlene Francis and Random House's tart Bennett Cerf, on the ``What's My Line?'' panel.
I became acquainted with stage actress, opera singer and socialite Kitty Carlisle Hart, long before I read her husband Moss' plays or saw her cavorting with the Marx Brothers, because she played ``To Tell the Truth.'' As did Betsy Palmer, who just breezed through town in Noel Coward's ``Blithe Spirit.''
New York, New York, it was a wonderful town.
But that was the 1950s, the golden age of television, before the industry left New York, the theater and the literati for Hollywood. The '60s slipped off, and we've been slipping ever since.
Last week when ``Jeopardy!'' featured ``celebrity'' contestants, the guest list was top-heavy with overexposed TV actors. The game shows weren't brain surgery, by any stretch, but they required a few more gray cells than Jenny Jones' daily binge-and-purge.
The best of the shows used words as tools not as hand grenades. What's more, they could be played safely in the parlor, without once opening the family closet and rattling the bones. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB