Wanna watch a rigged game show? I was talking here the other day about how game shows today are becoming less and less unplanned. I don't think it's quite the federal case that was made of such goings-on in the fifties but it might be nice if, for example, the folks sitting in the audience for a taping who think they might get picked to play during the show knew that the contestants who would be selected had all been pre-selected days in advance. Or that those contestants were all professional actors who'd been coached in how to act on camera when they played the game. (The game parts, at least, seem to be non-rehearsed and those who play win or lose on their own hunches. The sneaky part is that the selection process isn't as random and open and immediate as it's made out to be.)
Once upon a time, the outcome of some shows — usually of a quiz variety — were planned to the point of giving answers to contestants and ordering certain ones to throw the game when it seemed like a good time for them to go. You may remember this all being depicted in the movie, Quiz Show. And if you remember that film, you may recall a scene where a federal investigator goes to visit past contestants on the show Twenty One and one of them hands him an envelope. That contestant, for reasons not explained wanted to be able to prove he'd gotten answers in advance so he had mailed himself (but never opened) a letter containing the questions from one appearance. The postmark on the letter proved he'd had them before the date of that show.
Well, that contestant was James Snodgrass and this is an episode of Twenty One on which he appeared.
As I said, it wasn't explained, at least in the movie, why he did this. The answer may have something to do with what opens this episode. Snodgrass had lost, apparently as planned, on a previous episode. Then the producers received a flood of phone calls informing them that the wrong answer that cost him the game was actually correct. They had no choice but to bring him back for a return match and have him lose with a real wrong answer…which he does here. I'm guessing Snodgrass may have thought he was being double-crossed in some way so he sent the envelope to himself in case he ever felt the need to blackmail the producers. Why he handed it over to authorities, I don't quite understand.
But here's the show. Jack Barry is the host. The sponsor is Geritol, a tonic which turned out to be about as big a fraud as many of the quiz shows it sponsored…
