Games - Jack Barry

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	Games - Jack Barry

Jack Barry (March 20, 1918 - May 2, 1984) was an American television game show host and producer, whose career was nearly ruined in the quiz show scandal of the late 1950s but who made a remarkable comeback over a decade later.

Early life and career

Barry was born in Lindenhurst, New York and educated at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. In the 1940s he began on radio, where he met his partner Dan Enright. Once television broadcasting began, Barry and Enright would get involved in local programming, and eventually national programs, thanks in part to the success of early Jack Barry hits such as the children's show Winky Dink and You (conceivably the world's first interactive television program) as well as Juvenile Jury and Life Begins at 80. In the 1950s, Barry and Enright got involved in game shows, with Barry hosting The Big Surprise. He was eventually dismissed from his hosting duties and was replaced by Mike Wallace, making Barry decide to host his own game shows.

The quiz show scandals

In 1956, Barry and Enright debuted Twenty One
, which was sponsored by Geritol, and Tic Tac Dough. Both game shows were hosted by Barry. In 1958, on one episode of Twenty One, a game between challenger Charles Van Doren and champion Herb Stempel was found to have been rigged. (The 1994 movie Quiz Show was based on the Stempel-Van Doren contests.)

Within three months of the published revelation, Twenty-One was cancelled; another Barry-Enright production, Tic-Tac-Dough
, was cancelled as well. Barry next became the host of a new show Barry and Enright created with Robert Noah and Buddy Piper, Concentration
. Barry was dismissed from the nighttime after four weeks, with the quiz show scandal ramping up and Barry-Enright forced to sell their production operation to NBC. The daytime Concentration, hosted for most of its original NBC run by Hugh Downs, ran for 15 years.

Though it was Enright and Twenty-One assistant, Albert Freedman who rigged the shows, Barry admitted in the 1970s and 80s his eventual role in covering for them once he found out. After sponsor Geritol complained to Barry and Enright about the dullness of the first, un-rigged Twenty-One episode (the two initial contestants repeatedly missed questions) Enright admitted in a 1991 PBS interview that "from then on we decided to rig Twenty-One." According to game-show historian Steve Beverly, the late Professor William Martin of the University of Georgia, one of the government investigators probing the quiz scandals, said Barry did not likely know the deception until after a Twenty-One episode during which Barry defended the show. According to Beverly, "Martin insisted Barry still likely did not know of the deception until after that night, when NBC began pressing for the truth and Enright, apparently aware the entire company could go down, told Barry of the controls."

Barry was apparently not averse to "juicing" a show, even after the Twenty-One and Tic Tac Dough debacles left his career in eclipse. A veteran quiz producer once said that in the 1960s, when Barry was working on a pilot of a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production featuring "spontaneous" filmed responses, Barry would feed his respondents scripted lines to make them funnier.

After the scandals

Dan Enright found television work in Canada with Columbia-Screen Gems, while Jack Barry went to California. The two collaborated on small Canadian produced quiz shows including "Photo Finish" shot in Montreal and "It's a Match" taped in Toronto. It was on these shows that a number of young American and Canadian producers and directors got their start, including Sidney M. Cohen. After being unable to find national broadcasting work for several years in the wake of the quiz scandal (he did work locally in Los Angeles on television and radio), Barry finally bought a Los Angeles-area radio station (KKOP 93.5 FM, Redondo Beach, later renamed KFOX). Barry also owned a cable TV system in Redondo Beach. "Slowly," said a 1984 article in TV Guide which discussed game show hosts, "he began to receive calls: Would he fill in for five weeks on this game show? Yes. Of course." Barry appeared on a few local game shows in L.A. during this time (mostly on KTLA) and even played a newsman on the premiere of the mid-1960s TV series Batman. He did a guest reporter spot on the TV series The Addams Family. In 1969 he also became a host again, for ABC's The Generation Gap, replacing original host Dennis Wholey for the final weeks of its series.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Jack Barry (television) ]

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