Vote for why you think it jumped
Never Jumped
Day One
Quickie questions
Fannie and Dick
Shark Bytes
You know, those of us who were adults in the 1970s actually knew that there were actually actual gay people in the world! Honestly! In fact, some of us actually knew some actual gay people!
So the answer to the question "Who were they trying to fool?" is "No one."
We knew what the sitation was with the men and women who appeared with their platonic pals on "Tattletales."
It wasn't like the 1950s, when gay stars married and professed undying heterosexual love.
In the 1970s, appearing with a friend on a game show for straight couples and saying, "She is only my friend and nothing more," was progress. It was respectful toward the contestants, and respectful toward the viewer.
Think of the questions such couples raised in the minds of ignorant people. "If he is there with his pal, where is his wife or girlfriend?"
This is how things moved ahead from the Dark Ages to today. And it was good.
So the answer to the question "Who were they trying to fool?" is "No one."
We knew what the sitation was with the men and women who appeared with their platonic pals on "Tattletales."
It wasn't like the 1950s, when gay stars married and professed undying heterosexual love.
In the 1970s, appearing with a friend on a game show for straight couples and saying, "She is only my friend and nothing more," was progress. It was respectful toward the contestants, and respectful toward the viewer.
Think of the questions such couples raised in the minds of ignorant people. "If he is there with his pal, where is his wife or girlfriend?"
This is how things moved ahead from the Dark Ages to today. And it was good.
I'd love to see old reruns of "Tattletales"....is it on some cable channel??? I know once it came back BRIEFLY on the Game Show Channel....like in the middle of the night.....anyone know of any plans to bring it back? (In the old form, or maybe NEW....although how we'd get ANY long-married couples that would qualify is beyond me!
"TattleTales" was a great show in its initial run. Mark Goodson was noted for getting the most use of his employees by having them appear as panelists on his other shows. "TattleTales" exemplified this better than any other Goodson creation: Bob and Dorothy Jo Barker, Gene and Helen Rayburn, Richard and Jody Dawson, Bill and Ann Cullen, Allen Ludden and Betty White, Jack and Doe Narz, even Bert and Anne Convy when he would trade out with another Goodson host, not to mention all the other celebrity couples. When CBS cancelled the show in 1978, "TattleTales" still had a lot of life left in it and Bert Convy certainly had plenty left to give the show. When the network brought it back in 1982, it was too late. Viewers had gotten used to it not being there, forgetting how much fun it was. Also, so many the celebs that played the game so well had passed on by that time. Had the two stints been one uninterrupted run, "TattleTales" might never have faced a turning point. Instead, it's a tale of two shows: one ending too soon, the other trying to recapture the feel of something special.
One time they had Adrienne Barbeau and her boyfriend on. This was before she was very well known. Towards the end of the week, they asked the guys a question: Whose chest is bigger, yours or hers? When the women came on to try to match the answer, the first two hemmed and hawed and gave an answer. When it was her turn, Adrienne gave a smug smile and just said "Mine is." That was the correct answer, of course. Then Bert Convy very nervously asked "Can you tell us how big your chest is?" Adrienne refused to answer the question and just sat there with a great smirk on her face, her breasts filling the screen in a tight low cut top. From the look on her face, she knew that her chest was not only bigger than her boyfriend's, it was also bigger than Bert's, bigger than anyone else's on the show that day, and bigger than any other actress's in Hollywood. I was 16, and at the time I thought that was the greatest moment in the history of TV.
It is interesting to watch Tattle Tales today and see couples who are long since divorced acting like they have the greatest marriages in the world. Just the other day I saw Chuck Woolery and JoAnne Pflug (a game show staple of the 70's, she also was in the movie MASH) together. I didn't even know they were ever married. It is high comedy. I also like that these folks would smoke while doing the show. The great Scooey Mitchell smoked like a chimney while he was getting all his answers wrong. What do you mean you've never heard of Scooey Mitchell? Really? Anyway, I also got a kick out of the audience going crazy when they won because they got to split the winning. The winning couple generally had about $300 and they would kick in another grand for winning, meaning the 250 people sitting in the winning section would cart home about $5.20 each, before taxes! Righteous bucks!
The gay male celebs who appeared weren't "masquerading" as straight guys, the women they appeared with were just friends (case in point: Charles Nelson Reilly and longtime friend Elizabeth Allen). That said, I thought it was a pretty good show, though I missed the "clue" (buzz-in) questions after they went to all-quickies.
For me, the worst game shows of all time are the ones where we get treated to a half-hour of smarmy gossip in the name of winning prizes. And if all anybody wins in this type of game is about $150 or so, that makes it even worse. Sure, I watched this often when it started, like all new games, but it kinda got old when I realized that the whole point was just gossipy Q & A with the only payoff being a paltry few bucks for each audience member. Not the sort of game show I went for then or would today. The one thing it had going for it was the fact that it was the first game show to feature extensive use of bright, eye-popping kelly green almost everywhere after all those years of tired old blue-and-white or blue-and-yellow GS sets. But for MY money, the BEST game shows featuring married couples as contestants remain the original NBC 1969-70 version of "It Takes Two" with Vin Scully (which NBC sadly destroyed except for just one color tape episode), and CBS' vastly-underrated, over-pre-empted by affiliates, and strongly in need of a revival to prove itself 1975 game show, "Spin-Off" with Jim Lange. Now THERE was a truly exciting couples game with big money payoffs! And even more amazing: all or at least most of the old tapes were discovered at CBS in NYC in late 2000--and this series only ran 12 weeks! Game Show Network needs to put these on the air and prove to doubters what a superior game it was--and is--to anything involving embarrassing questions, consumption of animal testicles, cruel jokes on gullible young women unaware that the "millionaire" they seek to marry has only a five-figure bank account, etc.
When Tattletales only kept tattletale quickies at the end of 1974. I loved the buzz-in questions! That's the whole point of telling a tattletale! But it went to the Newlywed Game Format, silly sex-personality questions for the whooole show.
This show JTS when gay couples playing it straight. Not just Dick Sargent and Fannie Flagg (although that is the classic example). How about that flaming Charles Nelson Reilly? Who were these people trying to fool? Then again, look at who the host was. The show got better when two things happened: First: Bert Convy's hair got more afro-like and the format changed from a buzz-in question to everybody got asked the same question, a la Newlywed Game. But even with these improvements, gay people masking as straights is pretty sad. It's also pretty sad they had to (or felt they had to) do that back then.
I absolutely laughed my ass off when I saw this pathetic, staged, campy, and ridiculous show on "The Game Show Channel" the other day. What SLAYED me was that one of the "couples" was Dick Sargent (aka, the 2nd, inferior, Darrin on "Bewitched" who came out as a flaming, screaming gay man a few years back) and Fannie Flagg, (who wrote "Fried Green Tomatoes, a book about a lesbian couple later made into a hit movie). Fannie was SO overdoing it...all the other couples addressed each other by name, yet she kept calling Dick "Honey" and "Baby"...whoaaa, Fannie, settle down, my man! I mean, it was PAINFUL to watch! Now, if anyone has ever SEEN Dickey on "Bewitched", it's not too tough to figure out he's queer...he sort of swooshes around and gets unintentionally limp-wristed quite a bit. In every kiss he has with Samantha, he looks about as happy as Robert Reed did groping Florence Henderson's fat, flabby ass. And as for Fannie, well, let's just say she's a "great guy"! . Anyhow, it's obvious that both of them HAD to pretend to be straight, and this appearance on the show was part of the sick ruse. BUT...the BEST, MOST PRICELESS PART of this experience was when they showed the place cards in front of each couple....for example, "John and Patty" (John and Patty Duke Astin) etc. In front of our favorite "couple", the place card read..."Fannie and Dick"....ROTFLMAO. PRICELESS!
I saw Dick Sargent on this show with his "spouse" Fanny. We all know Dick was gay. The best thing about this was their names were together on the card on their podium... Thats right kids, it actually said "Dick and Fanny"!
It's especially fun to watch these reruns now. Couples like Patty Duke Astin and John Astin, back when they were so-called "happily married" couples. It's interesting to hear how lovey dovey they were back then. Now that they've been divorced forever and don't feel quite so warm and fuzzy about each other, you wonder what happened. Like the other person said, the red section often had the loser couples. I always root for the banana section myself.
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