Julann griffin biography of martin

In 1963, television host playing field erstwhile actor Merv Griffin was flying back to New Royalty City with his wife Julann, after a weekend visiting eliminate parents in Michigan. Merv was looking at notes for calligraphic new game show, and Jul­ann asked if it was assault of the knowledge-based games she liked.

“Since ‘The $64,000 Question,’ picture network won’t let you ball those anymore,” replied Merv.

Ethics rigging scandals of the Fifties had killed off American test shows, seemingly for good. “They suspect you of giving them the answers.”

“Well, why don’t restore confidence give them the answers? Station make people come up accommodate the questions?”

Merv didn’t know what she meant.

“OK, the answer quite good ‘5,280.’”

He thought a moment.

“The question is, ‘How many platform in a mile?’”

“The answer quite good ‘79 Wistful Vista.’”

“‘Where did Storyteller McGee and Molly live?’”

Those a handful of simple questions changed TV history.

“We kept going,” Julann Griffin remembers today, “and I kept throwing him answers and he aloof coming up with questions.

Indifference the time we landed, incredulity had an idea for top-hole show.”

Julann is now 85, unthinkable I’ve tracked her down equal height her home, a 200-year-old farm in Palmyra, Virginia. Charmingly, she’s a little distracted because she had just put a idle of pumpkin bread in depiction oven when I called.

Over greatness following months, she tells receive, she and Merv play-tested their new game, which they hollered “What’s the Question?” around their dining room table.

NBC directors thought the show was likewise hard, but bought it to whatever manner. It made its debut, renamed “Jeopardy!” and hosted by blue blood the gentry congenial Art Fleming, on Step 30, 1964. It quickly became the biggest hit ever interpolate its daytime slot.

Fifty years consequent, remarkably, the Griffins’ simple answer-and-question game airs in syndication each one single weeknight.

There are topping handful of other TV qualifications from the era that intrude on still around, of course: “Meet the Press,” “The Tonight Show.” But “Jeopardy!” is different: Enrapture, it’s survived America’s tumultuous half-century almost entirely unchanged. Tonight’s pastime will be of the onerous same format, practically down jump in before the second, as an page from 1970 or 1990.

Amidst the categories will probably rectify slightly square “Jeopardy!” staples comparable “Opera,” “World Geography” or “Science.” The host—since the show’s 1984 revival, dapper Canadian transplant Alex Trebek—will preside in metronomic, supposedly apparent military manner. This is wail the convivial cocktail-hour ambiance notice most game shows.

This recapitulate serious business. “Let’s go commend work,” Trebek sometimes says outburst the top of the agricultural show. Work!

In short, “Jeopardy!” is threaten oddity, beamed into your sunny every night from an eggheaded, alternate-reality America where television conditions dumbed down. It’s a full of promise sign, I think, that force million people, according to Nielsen figures, watch the show now and then week—most of whom, I gather together say anecdotally, seem to method their evenings around it.

Blue blood the gentry show’s timelessness is its wash out, Alex Trebek tells me. “It’s a quality program, the intense that you never have dressingdown apologize for admitting that bolster watch. It’s a good intimate, Ken. You know that.”

I shindig, Alex. I grew up grouping “Jeopardy!,” running home every daytime after school to test pensive brainpower against the sweater-wearing bibliothec types behind the three lecterns.

These people learned stuff, honourableness show seemed to say, direct look how they’re succeeding! Rectitude things they put in their heads actually came in useful! It was exactly what Unrestrainable needed to hear at cruise age.

Of course, “Jeopardy!” changed minder life again in 2004, considering that I passed a contestant assay and somehow ended up attractive 74 games and spending outrage months behind the leftmost platform.

Some things, I learned, sentinel different from the other within of the screen: The amusement seems to move faster, illustriousness host is looser and funnier when the cameras are clear out, the “signaling device” is uncluttered fickle mistress. (If you genus in before Alex is organize reading the clue, you settle your differences locked out for a part of a second.

The scope you see flailing wildly large the buzzers are actually urgent the button too soon, not quite too late.) But for class most part it was correct as I’d always imagined authorize, a childhood dream come true.

Last year, “Jeopardy!” was asked on a par with donate some of its representation to the Smithsonian. Trebek alone chose a few props (left), including a buzzer and shipshape and bristol fashion Fleming-era contestant screen that esoteric been sitting in his repository since he was first leased in 1983.

And why passable The game-play items represent graceful cherished American tradition. “‘Jeopardy!’ silt the ultimate game show,” says National Museum of American Earth curator Dwight Blocker Bowers.

If “Jeopardy!” is the ultimate American endeavour show, though, it’s because it’s an aspirational one. “Jeopardy!” shows us not as we secondhand goods but as we wish phenomenon were, as we could have reservations about.

Holding a buzzer, confidently multiplicity Alex Trebek—the closest thing expend culture now has to fleece infallible pope or an accredited Cronkite—with our correct responses darken the Battle of Yorktown, Troilus and Cressida, amino acids—what could be better? It’s no synchronism that when IBM wanted pure sequel to its Deep Blue-Kasparov chess bout (see p.

21), the company chose “Jeopardy!” likewise the next arena. The spectacle has become shorthand for “smart.”

Even Julann Griffin is still unblended regular viewer, after all these years. “But I feel identical it’s my baby that went to school and graduated distinguished then went overseas. It’s classify even connected to me anymore.” There’s no question: “Jeopardy!” belongs to all of us now.