In later years, he wrote numerous books that dealt with world history and the history of knowledge and served for 20 years as an editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Van Doren, along with seventeen other contestants, subsequently received a suspended sentence for lying to a grand jury. Prior to airtime he had been told the questions he would be asked and instructed on how to be more “entertaining” as he answered. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, Van Doren dramatically confessed a long-suppressed secret: Twenty-one had been rigged and he had willingly, though with pained ambivalence, participated in the deception.
As a result of his appearances as a triumphant contestant on one of the genre’s most popular programs, Twenty-one, Charles Van Doren, an instructor in the English department of Columbia University and son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, tried to use his newfound celebrity to promote values of “true education” to the television-viewing public. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows-relatively easy and inexpensive to produce-filled the prime-time schedule. As Revlon’s average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. Television had become the nation’s largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money.
“The Truth Is the Only Thing with Which a Man Can Live”: Quiz Show Contestant Charles Van Doren Publicly Confesses to Deceiving His Television Audience
0 kommentar(er)
