The Week in Review

In default of entertainment, television last week was giving away more money than ever before. CBS unveiled a new giveaway, Do You Trust Your Wife?, a money-tosser that has nearly as many M.C.s (Edgar Bergen and three of his dummies) as it does contestants (three married couples). The show is filmed--and filmed badly. Large blisters of light kept glaring on and off during the 30 minutes, seemingly timed to the excessive applause of the well-trained studio audience. The winning contestants: Robert and Roberta Hickey, parents of eleven children, who won $100 a week for a year when Roberta proved able to think of more states ending in "a" than either of her rivals. This week the Hickeys will be given the chance of competing for another $5,200.

The $64,000 Question, the Louis Cowan show with Emcee Hal March, is miles ahead of its competitors both in audience popularity and in the vital area of "human interest." Currently, the show is starring Mabel Morris, an aged (she admits to 75), sassy Dickensian expert who has intelligence, impressive knowledge of her special field, and a fetching voice quaver not unlike that of Ed Wynn. Newspaper reporters last week helped along the show's publicity by revealing that Mabel is on relief in Manhattan and that some $6,000 of her winnings will have to go toward clearing up her indebtedness to the city.

Other giveaway programs keep hoping that they will get to the top, too, if they just scatter enough loot along the way. NBC's The Big Surprise is still offering the biggest jackpot of all ($100,000) and still failing to get a jackpot-sized audience. CBS's Name That Tune has upped its ante to $25,000 without sensationally upping its rating, and ABC's Bert Parks loudly claims some sort of primacy for having dispersed "more than $5,000,000" over the years on Stop the Music and Break the Bank ("the granddaddy of all giveaways"). Even a few non-giveaway shows are elbowing into the act: ABC's Lawrence Welk Show--which is usually devoted to sugary waltzes--last month arranged for four lucky contestants to receive a new Dodge each year for the rest of their lives.

Other quiz-show producers have decided that money isn't everything, and are putting their chips down on funnymen whose questions to contestants are incidental to their jokes. Groucho Marx has a commanding lead in this division. His closest rivals are the venerable What's My Line?, I've Got a Secret (offering three comics: Garry Moore, Bill Cullen, Henry Morgan), and Two for the Money, which depends on the synthetic Hoosierisms of Herb Shriner.

At week's end, CBS -- which already has twice as many quiz shows as any other network -- gave further evidence of its faith in the potency of unrelated bits of knowledge by announcing the revival of still another Louis Cowan show, Quiz Kids, with a new set of child prodigies under the fatherly wing of Clifton Fadiman, 51, who learned his trade on such question-&-answer shows as Information, Please and This Is Show Business.

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