Groucho Marx had a long-running hit with this game show, You Bet Your Life, which was loved by the public. Actually, it was probably even more loved by its sponsors and whichever network had it at the moment. It was very high in ratings and quite low in production costs.
You Bet Your Life started as a radio program on ABC in October of 1947. Two years later, it moved to CBS Radio and the following year, it went to NBC as a simulcast, broadcast on both radio (until 1960) and TV (until 1961). For its last season, the name was changed to The Groucho Show. By then, reruns of it were already popular in TV syndication under the name, The Best of Groucho. So it had three titles and it ran on three networks plus local stations for a long time.
The minute the show was dropped by NBC — and maybe even before that — Groucho and the same production team made a pilot for a new series called What Do You Want? They kept Groucho's longtime announcer George Fenneman and altered the You Bet Your Life format to make it a bit less of a game show and a little more of a talk show. The new premise was to have the contestants be more colorful and to allow them to demonstrate unusual jobs or hobbies. Actually, they seem to have made at least two pilot episodes, If you can somehow sit through the entire one below, it includes preview clips from another episode…
Not very good, wouldn't you say? We can probably assume potential sponsors and/or the network or someone else felt the same way. Very quickly, the same behind-the-scenes folks retooled it into a slightly different show which debuted on CBS on January 11, 1962…less than four months after NBC broadcast the final The Groucho Show.
For the new series, Mr. Fenneman was replaced by a pair of young, attractive kids — Jack Wheeler and Patty Harmon who had appeared as contestants on You Bet Your Life. Harmon was then the youngest person to ever scale the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. Joy Patricia Harmon was an up-and-coming actress who later, as Joy Harmon, had a pretty nice career. She is probably best-remembered as the car-washing blonde in the film, Cool Hand Luke.
Groucho's first game show ran one month shy of fourteen years. His second, Tell it to Groucho, fell a bit short of that. It was on for a little less than five months. (George Fenneman fared only slightly better. He went off and hosted a daytime game show, also for CBS, Your Surprise Package. It ran for eleven months.)
Here's the pilot for Tell It to Groucho. It will be of special interest to anyone who has had a burning desire to see Groucho Marx not being very funny…
Most folks reading this will be surprised to learn that that was not the end of Groucho's days as a game show host. In 1965, he spent a few months overseas doing a You Bet Your Life clone called simply Groucho with Keith Fordyce, a British TV "presenter" and host as his Fenneman. This one ran eleven episodes and this is the only one I've ever seen…
After that, Groucho gave up on the world of game shows…or maybe it was the other way around. There were apparently moments in the sixties when there were rumblings about him having his own, gameless talk show. He hosted The Tonight Show for the week of 8/20/62 between the time Jack Paar left it and Johnny Carson took it over and then also appeared on Johnny's first episode. Despite the fact that Tell it to Groucho had just flopped, he apparently had some reason to believe he'd be offered the job if Carson hadn't done well with it.
That of course didn't happen. It's too bad that he never got the chance to really show what he could do with that format.