https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kGeAosjw3S8
Jeopardy posted the unaired pilot from the Art Fleming days yesterday. They really took the ‘question’ part seriously. You couldn’t just say the response like they do today, you had to format the question so that it would flow with the clue. Although the clues were different too. Much shorter.
I have been listening to some of the 1930s radio quiz shows which were the precursors to Jeopardy, on XM.
Holy fuck. The format was roughly like this: there was no competition between players, there was one player or several payers playing together. They were paired with some public intellectual, who they were permitted to consult if they got stuck, usually only once. The players had gotten there by winning contests.
The questions are
insane. There's no trivia, no Hollywood or sports, no pop music, it is straight science, history, mathematics, literature. And the questions are difficult -- I doubt most current college graduates could answer even one of them unless they were in that particular field. And the contestants are just normal people. Maybe one will be say a librarian or a high school teacher, but most are butchers or telephone operators or barrel makers or accountants. And ordinarily they run the table. They'll get maybe 80% on a bad day, perfect on good ones, and often don't even use the expert.
It's like the letters home from the civil war soldiers. It really brings home that there was once a class of autodidacts in this country who could turn their hands to Greek tragedy or Medieval history or the scientific revolution or Logical Positivism. They didn't just know facts, they had coherent understanding at a higher level across all those fields. They were humanists. And they were working class.
Yes, it was a selected sample. Yes, the point of the show was different. But even if you compare a show like "wait, wait don't tell me, "which is ostensibly supposed to be reaching the intelligent tenth of the population now, the difference is staggering. They aren't ironic or winky or hip, they are just in love with knowledge. It's so much more substantial and real. They have not yet lost their existence to the Vast Insipid Meta-Cultural Vaporfield of... now.
