The quiz shows that were fixed
In the 1950s, big-money quiz shows were the most popular programmes on American television. Then it came out that some were rigged. On a show called Twenty-One, the producers had given the answers in advance to a popular contestant, a young university teacher called Charles Van Doren, who won week after week, and told an earlier champion to lose on purpose. When the truth emerged in 1958, there were government hearings, some shows were cancelled, and it became a crime to fix a quiz show in the United States.
Game shows recovered, but the scandal is one reason quiz producers today keep contestants carefully apart from anyone who knows the questions.
Answer in the form of a question
On JEOPARDY, which began in 1964, contestants are shown the answer and must reply with the question, such as what is the Nile? Players pick a CATEGORY and a value, press a BUZZER to answer, and can WAGER some or all of their winnings on the final clue. In 2004 a computer programmer called Ken Jennings won seventy-four games in a row, and in 2011 a computer built by IBM, called Watson, beat him and another champion.
COUNTDOWN, where contestants make words from a selection of letters and hit a target number with arithmetic, was the very first programme shown when Britain's Channel 4 began broadcasting in 1982. WHEEL OF FORTUNE, first shown in 1975, is a spinning-wheel version of hangman, and FAMILY FEUD asks teams to guess the most popular answers given by a hundred people in a survey.
From the first quiz to a million
The first quiz on television was a Spelling Bee, broadcast by the BBC in 1938, when only a few thousand homes in and around London had a television set. In America, a radio show called Truth or Consequences, where contestants who got a question wrong had to perform a silly stunt, became one of the first game shows on commercial television in 1941.
The longest-running American game show is The Price Is Right, in which contestants guess the prices of prizes. It began in its modern form in 1972, and its host, Bob Barker, presented it for thirty-five years. Its games include Plinko, where a disc bounces down a board full of pegs into slots worth different amounts, and it is still being made today.
Who Wants to Be a MILLIONAIRE began in Britain in 1998, with fifteen increasingly difficult questions and three lifelines: ask the audience, phone a friend, and fifty-fifty, which removes two wrong answers. Its dramatic lighting and pauses made even easy questions tense, and it was remade in more than a hundred countries; a version of it is at the heart of the film Slumdog Millionaire. The first person to win the top prize in Britain, in 2000, was Judith Keppel.
The grid also holds PYRAMID, PASSWORD, WIPEOUT and CHARADES, and the language of every show: the HOST, the CONTESTANT, the ROUND, the TRIVIA question, the PUZZLE, the ANSWER, the BONUS, the JACKPOT, the PRIZE and the WINNER. Our board games page covers games to play at home.