Hello and welcome back to Barry Lee’s seven-part guest post series. And this week, the time has arrived for Barry to take his place in the contestant’s seat…
==================================================================
= Pick a Box Redux II =
In 1981, Pick a Box was reborn in all but name as Ford Superquiz, with Bert and Patti Newton, and Philip Brady as announcer.
Each show consisted of three best-of-five question contests between champs and challengers. The receptacles with the mystery prizes were called “prisms”, but later changed to “boxes”, when Bob Dyer contacted Bert and gave his blessing for the term “box” to be used. There were 20 prisms/boxes – a contestant who survived to pick them all and then returned for one last successful contest received $50,000 in addition to the other prizes and cash picked up along the way. If everything went well, the total cash and prizes on offer amounted to about $100,000.
The questions, which were of a similar standard to Pick a Box, were written and adjudicated for most of its run by by John Morris, who had been a champ on the earlier show. Hutton Gibson, father of Mel, is the contestant whose name comes up most often in any searches for Ford Superquiz, but in the two seasons it ran, only one contestant had the good fortune to win everything and that, as it turned out, was me.
Barry with the cheque for his ‘Ford Superquiz’ winnings, sitting between Patti and Bert.
It took 88 questions, of which I answered 82 correctly, and three tiebreakers in the 21 match-ups I faced, to get through it all. One tie-breaker, from recollection, was against Trevor Sauer, who later went on to do very well on other shows, but the one I will never forget was against Margaret Lawrence who had, as far as I am aware, never lost on a TV quiz show. It was the second last show of 1981 and the producers obviously wanted the sort of carryover champ whose name would help to maintain interest over the long break before the show resumed in 1982.
After the first five questions, we were tied on 4 points – I guessed wrongly that Amundsen was the Polar explorer who won the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize (it was Nansen) and Margaret had forgotten that Abraham was the father of Ishmael. On the first tiebreaker we both knew that Trollope wrote Barchester Towers. The next question involved knowing the number of balls on the table at the start of a game of snooker*. In a contest between a young man and a highly refined lady of a certain age, that probably seemed like an unfair question, but this then young man had never played snooker and was not a fan of Pot Black. I had, fortuitously, read that detail during the flight to Melbourne the day before, in a little spiral-bound notepad I had put together which grouped and summarised a lot of random facts, particularly on subjects for which I had no real affinity. Aside from having a bit of a brag, I mention that story as an illustration of the role of chance and good fortune in game shows. Then – and now – I have no delusions about how lucky I was with that outcome – the overall range and depth of Margaret’s general knowledge would have far exceeded mine. When the show returned in 1982, I appeared on four more episodes to get to the final prize which, at the time, resulted in the largest single winnings on an Australian game show – about $95k. My last question asked “Which emperor was forced to renounce his legendary divinity in 1946?” I briefly mused over Haile Selassie and then quickly realised it had to be Hirohito.
The change to my finances was very nice, but the rest of it was weird – why are the people standing behind me in the checkout queue so interested in what groceries I am buying? Who is that bloke on TV who looks a bit like me but sounds like someone else?? There were plans for a Superquiz championship, but that all came to nought when the show lost the ratings battle with A Country Practice and ended with the 1982 season.
Superquiz aired once a week – as had Pick a Box – with three episodes recorded every third Sunday in the old GTV 9 studios in Richmond – warm, welcoming red brick on the outside and intriguingly labyrinthine on the inside. My first appearance was in the final episode recorded for the day – I started on the second best of five question match-ups in that episode. After that, it was three weeks before returning for the final recording session for 1981 – then a 15-week break for the first recording session of 1982. Those three episodes took me tantalisingly close, with another three weeks to wait before returning for one final match-up to win all that was on offer. I’ve mentioned this detail as a reminder that, as is so often the case in life, a capacity to deal with delayed gratification can also be important to success in the world of game shows!
==================================================================
Absolutely! I remember being stressed about my two week gap between the first four episodes and the final three episodes of my seven-night run on Temptation in 2005… but Barry! Your 15-WEEK wait must have been absolutely AGONISING! (You earned every cent of that prize money, if you ask me). Join us again next week, when Barry recounts his adventures on a show that’s a lot familiar (well, familiar to me, anyway): SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALE OF THE CENTURY!
And by the way, if you’re in Melbourne, I’m thrilled to report that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival season of my new show For The Term of His Natural Lies is NOW UNDERWAY! Huzzah! But there are just 13 shows left… every night from now until April 20, at 8:45 PM, and you can grab tickets RIGHT HERE:
I’d love to see you there. And if you do get along, please come and say hello after the show – promise I’ll be friendly!
* For those playing along at home, there are 22 balls (15 red, 6 coloured, and 1 white) on the table at the start of a snooker game.
Tweet