Folks who drop by this site — we just passed 125,000 — seem to have been interested in the stuff about the old game show, What's My Line? One asked if the program had been "fixed" and, if so, whether it was impacted by the Great Quiz Show Scandals. The answer is that What's My Line? wasn't rigged in the sense that Dotto or 21 or a few others were manipulated, with contestants being fed the answers to control dramatic tension. Actually, on the fixed game shows, a more common practice was to rig by asking contestants questions the producers knew they could answer. In order to get on such a program, you had to take a test to prove you were smart enough to compete. Sometimes, those tests would be several hundred questions long and, if you scored well and made the show, the producers could ensure your winning — or even knock you off — by asking a question that you'd gotten right or wrong on the test. There were people who won on "rigged" quiz shows who never realized the fix was in and who could truthfully say, "No, they never gave me any answers."
But the panel shows — like What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth and I've Got A Secret — were never rigged in that way. There was no point to it. The appeal of those shows was in the panel's interplay, and no great sums of cash were at stake. (The most you could win on Line was something like $50 and, at times, they paid each contestant the full amount so that nobody would whine that they'd been swindled out of cash by the frequent anomalies in the gameplay.) In fact, not only did the producers not give the players the right answers, they frequently gave them the wrong ones.
The practice was called "gambitting" and it was based on the premise that a lot of the fun on such a show was in the panelists naïvely asking questions that had great, unintentional meaning. For example, questioning a man she didn't know sold beds for a living, Dorothy Kilgallen might ask, "Could Bennett Cerf and I use one of these together?" Of course, the audience would get hysterical. Those funny situations occurred naturally but, to make sure they occurred a little more often, the producers would often go to the panelists and suggest an area of errant questioning. Dorothy Kilgallen, actually, would rarely engage in it. She wasn't a comedian and was more interested in winning the game than in getting laughs. But most of the panelists — the comics, especially — would dutifully ask the lady who made girdles, "Could I use your product?" Or they'd ask a man who sold elephants, "Might I have one of these in my living room?" They didn't know what the contestant's secret was but they knew that the questioning they'd been told to pursue would get big boffs.
Once you're aware of the practice, it becomes very obvious. That's especially true on a lesser-known Goodson-Todman show that Game Show Network runs on occasion called, The Name's The Same. As this one plunged in the ratings, its staff ratcheted up the use of gambits to the point where the show really came off as phony and its panelists look almost stupid at times.
In any case, this went on a lot in the fifties. When Congress began investigating the game shows for fraud, What's My Line? and other shows cut back on gambits for fear the inquiry would reveal the little sham practice. But it was done and it was a shameful practice, done back in the days when television shows used to actually lie to us! Thank heavens they don't do stuff like that, these days.
Oops. Can't write any more right now. Have to go watch Wrestling…