My all-time favorite game show might just be I've Got a Secret, particularly the version that had Garry Moore as host with Bill Cullen, Henry Morgan, Bess Myerson and Betsy Palmer on the panel. Lots of old episodes run on cable channels and therefore turn up on YouTube.
Someone just posted a very early one with only Moore and Cullen from the above roster. The series started on June 19, 1952 so it was still in its formative stage on September 18 of that year when this episode aired. Keep in mind that this is live television, not pre-recorded television.
One thing that they eventually stopped doing — and it was a better show because they stopped — was that the producers stopped planting questions with the panelists who had to guess the secrets. They reportedly did not give the panelists the answers but they gave them questions they were supposed to ask innocently but which would be funny to the audience that knew what the secret was.
For instance, in this episode, the first contestant's secret is that her father jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. The panel is told that her secret is "something her father did" and then the questioning starts with Mr. Melville Cooper, who almost immediately asks, "Is it something I could do?" (big laugh) and then "Do you think my wife would like me doing it?" (bigger laugh) Obviously, the producers told him to ask those things as if he just happened to think to ask them. (By the way: One of the those producers was Allan Sherman, co-creator of the program and later a singer of top-selling comedy records.)
They did a lot of this planting of questions on the show in its early days but stopped. Around 1956, it became a major scandal in this country that some of the quiz shows were rigged with contestants being given answers in advance and the producers controlling who won and lost, configuring the scenario for maximum excitement. Before the scandal exploded, there were rumblings that game shows weren't completely on the up-and-up so many shows even stopped that kind of question-planting.
Goodson-Todman, the company that produced I've Got a Secret and some others, stopped planting questions as these suspicions mounted. There was actually no way to really "rig" their shows because the winnings were of little importance. After all, on Secret the most a contestant could win was eighty dollars. But on this episode, they were still doing it and it gave a very phony air to the proceedings.
I have set this video embed to start with the second contestant of that evening. If you want to watch the first game — the one in which the contestant's father leaped off the Brooklyn Bridge — just move the little slider all the way to the left and the playback will start from the beginning. I did that because the second contestant is of great interest to me and, I'm supposing, many who read this site. It's Ham Fisher.
Ham Fisher was the guy responsible for the popular newspaper strip, Joe Palooka...or at least, Fisher's name was signed to it. Like another, unrelated Fisher — Bud Fisher, who did Mutt & Jeff — Ham Fisher started his strip and when it became successful, he hired others to write and draw it. One of the many who ghosted it was Al Capp, well before he created Li'l Abner. In the annals of comic strips and books, there may have been no two people who hated each other more than Al Capp and Ham Fisher, especially after Abner became a much more popular strip than Joe Palooka.
There were threats and invective and thinly-veiled attacks within their strips and it kinda reached its apex when someone began circulating photostats of Li'l Abner comic strips. They were charging that Capp had hidden pornographic imagery here and there…subtle but unmistakable.
It turned out that the alleged porn was not present in the strips when they ran in thousands of newspapers. There remains some question on how the naughty imagery got into the stats. Some say the strips were doctored; others say it was just artful cropping of what Capp had drawn. Either way, the stats were not legitimate evidence and the "someone" who was circulating them to try and hurt Capp turned out to be Ham Fisher.
Fisher was censured and ousted from the National Cartoonists Society for "conduct unbecoming a cartoonist." I think he's the only person who ever was even though some others — like, say, admitted rapist Al Capp — did far worse. Soon after, Ham Fisher committed suicide. Capp gloated that it was because of the ousting and humiliation…and that may have been a major reason but Fisher was in failing health and had just had his home destroyed in a storm. So maybe those factors entered into the man's decision to take his own life.
But here, we see Ham Fisher as a big celebrity on a highly-rated TV program a little more than three years before the end of that life. And if you want to keep watching after the Ham Fisher segment, the next contestant is the stunning actress Veronica Lake and the panel has to uncover her secret which was — and talk about your scandals! — that she thought her feet were too big.