Today on Stu's Show, your genial host Stu Shostak welcomes your genial host Monty Hall for two hours of chat, mostly about Monty's work in game shows like Video Village, Split Second, Keep Talking and (of course) Let's Make a Deal. To make his guest feel right at home, Stu will conduct the entire interview dressed as a giant lobster.
Monty Hall endures a lot of jokes like that…and he should. It's kind of the trade-off for all the money he made hosting (and owning) one of the most successful programs in television history. I'm not sure everyone understands how successful that show was. The folks running NBC then didn't, back when it was the cornerstone of their daytime lineup. It went on the air there in 1963…and legend has it that almost no one at the network thought it had much chance to succeed. But succeed it did in a big way. So did NBC then appreciate it? Nope. Legend also has it they resented it, dismissed it as an anomaly for five years and then in '68 when it came time for contract renewal, tried to lowball Monty Hall, TV's Big Dealer, with piddling offers. Incensed, Mr. Hall took his three doors and his trading floor over to ABC and probably derived great satisfaction as not just his ratings but all of ABC's daytime numbers surged and the NBC schedule got zonked. Let's Make a Deal also performed enormously well when either network would occasionally slot it for a while in prime time.
I never cared for Let's Make a Deal. It was too repetitive for me and it hovered too close to the old Truth or Consequences concept of entertainment, which was to make the contestants look like damn idiots. But I respected its popularity and the skill with which it was done. It's been revived many times since with many hosts but only Monty and that original crew of it were ever able to make it really work. I hope Stu asks him why he thinks that magic has been so difficult to recapture.
And I really did like Monty's other game shows — some he hosted, some he owned. Video Village, which he took over (reportedly without ever having seen the show before) was a great program. So was Split Second, which his company produced after Deal went over to ABC. Before Let's Make a Deal, his outfit also produced a largely-forgotten program called Your First Impression that was quite intriguing and which inspired a lot of other game shows that dealt in free association. I trust they'll talk about them too on Stu's Show.
You can hear Stu's Show by clicking your computer over to Shokus Internet Radio at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is from 4 PM to 6 PM on the West Coast, 7 PM to 9 PM on the East Coast and other times in other zones. That's right…they do it live and while you can tune in all week for replays, you'll enjoy it more if you listen when Monty is actually in the luxurious Shokus Broadcasting Complex out in Chatsworth, California. Give a listen…and remember that you should never hold onto whatever is on the tray that Jay's bringing down the aisle. Seven times out of ten, it's Rice-a-Roni.