Several of you have written me about the TV show Queen for a Day, which I mentioned here earlier. A couple of folks thought it was unfair of me to refer to the program as "one of the most ghastly shows ever produced" when it was, in fact, far worse than that.
If you'd like to see how horrible a television series can be, there's an episode from 1960 that can be watched online at this link. This was late in the show's run — it was cancelled in '64 — and my sense is that they'd toned it down over the years and that it was once even worse than this. But this is still pretty awful.
The "winner" of this episode seems stunned and maybe even displeased by the whole thing. Usually, they cried and got hysterical and you can sense a little frustration on the part of the host, Jack "not Goofy" Bailey, that this one didn't. (I am not bothering to put up a Spoiler Warning since none of you will make it all the way through to the end. I skipped ahead.)
But as you'll see, the show was tasteless, demeaning to women, demeaning to anyone who watched it, cheap, insulting and utterly degrading to the human spirit. And like you, I have no idea why it hasn't been revived as a reality show on NBC.