What I Watched: What seems to be the TV debut of the game show You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx with announcer and co-host George Fenneman. This episode aired on NBC at 8:00 pm on Thursday, October 5, 1950 and is available on YouTube.
What happened: Groucho is introduced in the manner of a big star. He calls up a young couple from Owens, Illinois to guess the secret world, which is shown on George’s shirt. Groucho banters with the couple about where they’re from, and the guy’s job as a production recorder. His job seems to just be recording the production of bottles. Man, those were the days. His wife also works at the plant.
The announcer introduces the rules: each of three competing man/woman teams can choose how much money to bet on four questions on a particular subject, and the pair that gets the highest amount at the end of the show will get the chance to answer a question for $1000. The duo’s topic is national parks, and all of the questions ask them to name the state a national park is in. They get them all right, but are pretty conservative on the last question, and end up with $80.
The two following pairs are made up of individuals picked from the studio audience.The next pair is Pauline and Huntley from Glendale. She works at a self-service laundry, and he is “living here.” I’ve been there, man. When describing the layout of the laundry, Pauline uses the secret word “wall”, which cause a plastic chicken to descend from the ceiling. This adds $100 to their prize pool. There’s a surprisingly detailed discussion of how the laundry operates. They receive questions on literary heroes’ best friends. Huntley goes all-in on question 2, which seems bold, and then again on question 4. He gets the fairly easy answer of “Robin Hood”, and walks away with $180.
The final duo is the older Mary Mitchell and the much shorter William Feeler. Groucho hints at the secret word as “something you find around the house”, which is pretty clever. She works with a “catcare club”, which is essentially an animal shelter. He makes and sells pliers, and fasts for most of the week. Today he would have a Substack. He goes on to say that he gives away counterfeit $50 bills with each pair, and go on a rant about utopian political schemes so I think this guy may not be entirely serious. They’re given questions about rivers, and get them all right, but only end up with $85. George tells them that they didn’t win enough right to their faces.
Pauline and Huntley are given the final question, which is about the capital of Korea. Pretty bold question, considering the timing. They are given fifteen seconds to confer, and come up with Seoul to win $1000, on top of $180 from the regular round and $100 from the Secret Word. We conclude with a brief advertisement for DeSoto Plymouth cars.
What I thought: I’ve previously heard of You Bet Your Life, mostly as an early game show, but also through the ads for the contemporary Jay Leno revival which seem to occur at least three times during every episode of Jeopardy on YES TV. And of course I knew of Groucho Marx from the Marx Bros movies, and knew enough to know that he was an odd choice for a game show host. So I wasn’t that surprised to see that You Bet Your Life was largely a pretext for Groucho riffing on the contestants as well as anything else that crossed his field of vision.
This would seem to be the premiere episode of the TV version of You Bet Your Life (I’m somewhat skeptical of the YouTube dating), but there’s no real attempt to introduce the premise. The series had been on the radio for three years, although it had made the jump from CBS to NBC beginning with this season. Remarkably, the same show was broadcast over both NBC radio and television, an arrangement that would last for a decade. The show was already being performed before a live audience, so in a sense going to television was just opening things up to a larger audience. This was also one of the first NBC variety series to be filmed in Hollywood instead of broadcast live from the network’s New York studios.
To be fair, the actual game doesn’t take much explanation. Each team is asked four questions, and can wager what they like. The questions all seemed pretty easy to me, with all three teams going 4/4. My inner James Holzhauer would suggest that this was really a test of nerve rather than of knowledge, and that the best strategy would be to go all-in n each question. But contestants going bankrupt was apparently pretty common under this format of the show, so maybe this week is just an outlier.
The main focus, however, is Groucho’s interviews with the people selected from the crowd. Like What’s My Line, another series more about banter than gameplay, You Bet Your Life serves as a way to explore the lives of ordinary people, with a focus on the world of work. There’s like a three or four minute section of this episode that’s just a woman describing how the laundromat she runs operates, and it’s hard to imagine that making it to air in any other era of television. The two-person teams seem a little odd, especially when it’s a unrelated man and woman, but I suppose it makes the banter easier.
While there are a lot of preserved episodes of You Bet My Life, few are from this era of the series, with the next one I can find being in April of 1950. It will be interesting to see if and how the series fine-tunes its approach to the visual medium. While weekly analysis of this series could be a pain, I’m kind of sad we won’t get to see Groucho for quite a while.
What else is on?: It was a very variety-heavy night, as CBS aired semi-weekly variety series The Show Goes On with Robert Q. Lewis, whose guests included Morton Downey, and ABC broadcast the game show Stop the Music. In the New York area, you could also watch local variety shows Talent Parade and Stairway to Stardom, as well as a public affairs series hosted by acting NY mayor Vincent Impellitteri and with special guests including the Police Commissioner. The clear pick of the night, however, is the local DuMont affiliate’s showing of the film Revenge of the Zombies with John Carradine.
Coming up next: Kukla, Fran, and Ollie round out the week with a “Dragon Pep Rally.”
The Eternal Couch Potato 