Would YOU Like to Be...?!

The most embarrassingly outdated show I've reviewed for this blog is also an ancestor for one of the most modern of TV genres.



Queen for a Day, "The Hairdresser Show"
OB: sometime in the second week of February 1964, 3:30 p.m. EST, ABC
I was a month old when this show was first broadcast.


"Would YOU like to be QUEEN for a day?!"
                    --Jack Bailey's intro to most Queen for a Day episodes

I've known so much baby boomer TV trivia over the years, it once won me a trip to Hollywood.

In September 1999, after a rollercoaster summer that included my being let go from one job, quickly getting another and being dumped by a fiancee, I won the national online competition to be a finalist in the TV Land Ultimate Fan Search, which would culminate in a TV special on that network. I did that by taking an online quiz that included questions about, among other things, Floyd the Barber's favorite flower on The Andy Griffith Show. Several other finalists won in competitions held in various cities. We then competed in semi-final rounds in Hollywood, and did interviews on camera that actually affected our scores. ("You blew them away in the interview apparently," one of the other losing contestants, who I was sure would beat me, later told me. I think I'd told the interviewers I wanted to impress a girl or something.) I was eliminated in the last off-air round, despite my winning an argument with the judges over exactly how Lt. Col. Henry Blake died on M*A*S*H. The last round would be played on TV in a half-hour game show format, not unlike the old MTV show Remote Control, right down to an eliminated contestant suddenly having her seat pulled back behind the set. The week was a trip for two, and they put me and my brother Phillip up at the famous Roosevelt Hotel, which overlooked Grauman's Chinese Theater and actually had the Hollywood Walk of Fame going by on two sides.

That's me in the green shirt under the Get Smart sign, joining the rest of my fellow TV geeks/pie judges.

It was a whirlwind week that involved a tour of the Paramount Studios (where we visited the active sets of Judging Amy and Entertainment Tonight as well as the outdoor set where Laverne and Shirley did their famous opening chant), a tour of famous shooting locations in Culver City--we got to see the Brady house, as well as the one where Richie, Joanie and Mr. and Mrs. C all lived--and my brother and I scored tickets to two tapings of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher at CBS Television City. A walk to a cyber cafe brought me face to face with Siegfried and Roy, as they were presented with their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

On the last day of that week, we all got herded aboard a bus that took us to the Nick Studios, a/k/a Nickelodeon on Sunset. There was a lot to do and places to go and pictures to take. We had to wear big red banners that bore the location from which we came into the contest (mine said TVLand.com), that made us look like we were all judging pies at a state fair or something. We were herded through the studio, at one point waiting briefly onstage on the living room set of one of my daughter's then-favorite shows, Kenan & Kel, for final instructions.



The taping itself was a disaster. The half hour show took about three and a half hours to tape with constant reshoots. The eliminated contestant who got pulled through the wall had to re-experience that humiliation three more times due to some kind of technical issue. The audience got restless. The president of TV Land angrily stomped out of the studio. Special guest star Barbara Eden was noticeably impatient; when my brother and host Chuck Woolery shared a smoke break on the balcony, the former host of Wheel of Fortune and Love Connection vented to him about what a slipslod production this turned out to be. I did get to shake hands with Woolery and with announcer Rod "Come on down!" Roddy, and got to at least say hi to Barbara Eden. And I got to make small talk with the show's cute model, but whisked away before I could get her phone number or a brutal shootdown, whichever one was going to happen. (At least a shootdown would've given me a funny story to tell my friends.) I got a passing glimpse of myself in the final broadcast; my brother Phillip, sitting amid the rest of the audience, was actually seen more prominently during the closing credits. And a fellow named Malcolm Bondon won, and got to program one hour a week of TV Land's programming for an entire year based on their library of TV episodes. A fun, wonderful memory, if not exactly a model of how a game show should be taped.

"Nickelodeon On Sunset" by Matthew E. Cohen - Nickelodeon Studios - 2/2. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nickelodeon_On_Sunset.jpg#/media/File:Nickelodeon_On_Sunset.jpg

But anyway, back to Nickelodeon on Sunset. Because it was taping day and everything had to be done on what was supposed to be a tight schedule, we never got a tour, or the full story of the studio's history. We could tell it clearly predated Nickelodeon, for that matter cable TV and likely even TV itself.



We saw enough interior architecture, like statues, and photos that lined the walls--I specifically recognized Fanny Brice and a blackfaced Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, better known as radio's Amos 'n' Andy--so we knew they likely did live shows and/or radio programs there at one time. It turns out it began life in 1938 as the Hollywood version of the Earl Carroll Theater. In the 1950s it was converted into a nightclub called the Moulin Rouge, and later to a go-go club and rock venue named after the TV series Hullabaloo. Television production was no stranger to the place even before Nickelodeon took over, with The Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon and the original 1980s version of Star Search originating from there. (And I think someone did tell us about Star Search at the time.) Of course, there were the many Nick shows like All That and iCarly.

But perhaps the most famous, or infamous, show to originate from that facility, was quite possibly the one show no one mentioned that entire week, and we must've told each other the name of every show we ever heard about, as we formed a bond through our classic TV geekdom. The show whose existence predated most of our memories, that made this place home for its entire eight-year TV run, was the laughably outdated version of "female empowerment" known as Queen for a Day.

Perhaps it wasn't mentioned to us because it's considered one of the rock-bottom, worst shows in television history...if not the worst.
But in its day, it was hugely popular. Beginning in the early 1950s, the radio, then television versions of Queen for a Day became such a part of the Moulin Rouge, organizations began to hold conventions in the greater LA area so they could get batch tickets to a broadcast. (And the show we'll spotlight is one such show.) It was so popular that at one point, NBC charged $4,000 a minute for participating advertising time. (A contestant's plug for her family's local egg business in a 1962 show prompted host Jack Bailey to tell the contestant that coast-to-coast plug over ABC was worth $7,000 at that point. That's $52,000 in 2016 dollars.) The show pioneered spot advertising and had a lot of commercial time, lots of time just reading off that day's lengthy sponsor list, and looked surprisingly smooth to operate considering the many models, quick turnaround time, and the fact they probably had multiple sets of prizes that were gathered at the last second for contestants who might not have won. It was clearly a burgeoning franchise, reportedly generating $9 million in income for NBC just in one year.



At the time, daytime network advertising was sold in quarter hours, with daytime soap episodes often coming in at 15 minutes per day. But Queen for a Day was so successful and brought in so much advertising money, at one point NBC expanded each show to 45 minutes. And often, the commercials were done live from the set, with announcer Gene Baker exhaling a lot of cigarette smoke as he sold Old Golds, or host Jack Bailey leering at a human-sized mermaid mannequin as the two of them pitched Chicken of the Sea tuna.


The show had an army of models, by the way, even more than the current day Price is Right. They even seemed to have one group who modeled prizes, a second group who did the fashion segment, and a third who escorted the contestants--or as they were called on the show, "candidates"--over to Jack Bailey.

As for what kind of a show it was...well, looking at it now is, at first, quite a jaw dropper.

A friend of mine once described it perfectly without ever having even heard of the show. He dreamed one night about a game show called I've Got It Worse! He imagined it opening with someone saying, "My wife left me, my power was shut off and I just found out I have cancer," followed by another contestant saying, "Oh yeah? Well, I've got it worse!" and the audience breaking into applause as the theme music begins. Except for the opening, he'd just explained the very premise of Queen for a Day.



On television the rules were simple: four members of the audience would tell their sob stories about why they should win, based on either hard lives or better yet, their desire to help someone else first despite their own hard lives. (The contestants eventually figured out that was how to win.) At the end of the show...O.K. you might want to be ready for this one...the four would sit at a long table, and the audience would applaud who had the "best" sob story, and it would be measured...on an applause meter, like it was a talent show. (Earlier on radio, a panel would winnow five contestants down to three, and the audience would vote on those three...again, by whose hopes and misery drew the most claps on the applause meter.)



Yes, a horrible life would be worth valuable prizes. It really was that crass. The losing contestants who went back to their miserable old lives unchanged, at least got electric skillets and perfume.



The show debuted on local radio as Queen for Today in 1945, then switched to the national Mutual Radio network later that year and adopted the more famous Queen for a Day moniker. The two earliest radio shows known to exist are from August 1945 and are interrupted with war bulletins...the first, by a series of bulletins falsely reporting the Japanese had just surrendered followed by bulletins retracting, and apologizing for, the earlier false bulletins, something that must've unnerved worrying mothers and families of men and women still serving their country in the South Pacific. (The actual surrender came days later.)

That would be a near-perfect foreshadowing for the 19-year parade of tastelessness and festival of false hopes that would be the Queen for a Day  radio and TV series.

A trial run of the TV version aired as early as 1948 on local TV in Los Angeles. By 1950 that had become a regular broadcast that host Jack Bailey often plugged on radio. The network version premiered on NBC Daytime in January 1956, eventually switching to ABC in October 1960.



Jack Bailey hosted the show from its 1945 network radio inception until its TV cancellation in October 1964. The Iowa native previously worked in vaudeville and was a carnival barker at the 1933 New York World's Fair. His other radio work included announcing duties on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Duffy's Tavern. But he was also something of a character actor. In the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," when Violet elbows several suitors out of the way to hit on George (Jimmy Stewart), he's one of those suitors. His television acting work included Green Acres, Gunsmoke, I Dream of Jeannie and Ironside. He also hosted the TV version of Truth or Consequences from 1954 until 1956, filling a gap between Ralph Edwards and Bob Barker. But ultimately he'll be remembered, if at all, for this one show.



Described by those who worked for him as a very friendly guy who seemed to get along with everyone, Bailey doesn't always come off that way on camera, at least not in this millennium. On a 1950 radio episode, when a woman's wish is to lose some of the weight she gained due to the birth, and illness, of a baby, Bailey says "You'd have to use a buzzsaw to do it in two months" in response to her proposed timetable. (Her husband was away on a work assignment and she wanted to surprise him.) But ultimately Bailey assured her, "We'll start hammering and hacking and see what we can do" if she won. In a 1962 show, when a woman wanted 50 mau-mau dresses to put on a Hawaiian luau for some little girls, Bailey sizes up the rather big woman and says, "Well I can see why you'd need at least two."

One producer said Bailey's style was to respond to a woman saying, "Oh my son is sick with tuberculosis" not with "Oh no, I hate to hear that!" but with "Well next time tell him to put on an overcoat when he goes out." Though he always liked to tease, Bailey wasn't always that crass or tone-deaf. Mostly he was very warm and kind to the contestants. When one woman--who wanted her run-down, ten year old car fixed so she could go on babysitting assignments--said she got a traffic ticket on her way to the studio that day, Bailey got his announcer, floor manager and director to pool the $6 to pay it off.



Some people noted even back then, Bailey occasionally looked like he downed a few before airtime. Indeed, Bailey openly admitted being a member of Alcoholics' Anonymous as far back as 1948. Actors like Richard Chamberlain even admitted getting their big breaks, partly because a family member knew Bailey from AA.



The contestants, to be fair, were all everyday, non-glamorous women (except when everyday, non-glamorous men occasionally competed to be "King for a Day") and a vast majority of them appeared to be sincere. If they had tears, they were real, but the ones who didn't cry were probably even more moving. They seemed to have tough lives they'd gotten used to. One winning contestant had a son with cerebral palsy and wanted a new wheelchair and an exercise bike. She got both, along with a vacation to Jamaica, a set of small appliances and cookware, a sewing machine, a dishwasher, a years' supply of frozen dinners and an Amana freezer. (One staffer recalled years later many of these women were so poor, they didn't have major appliances in their homes, or if they did they were older, now-failing models.)

Many wanted things for someone else--a stove for a church (which was rebuilding after a devastating fire), electric blankets for nearby firefighters, or in one case, a taxidermy set and muskrat traps for a family of boys and her husband who all loved to hunt. And many wanted simple things. A Filipino woman wanted a basketball and encyclopedia set for her two sons, and a hearing aid for her husband, all of whom lived back in the Philippines.The woman who wanted her '46 Pontiac fixed so she could leave home to babysit children, got her car repaired by the Pep Boys...then was told to sell it because she was going to get a brand new one from a Los Angeles Ford dealer. (She also got a ton of prizes, including a freezer, a washer, and a trip to Hawaii.)



One woman wanted a new washer and dryer so she could make money taking in other people's laundry. She wanted to pay off some medical bills that piled up. She lost out to a woman whose brother was shot multiple times (mistaken for someone else) and had to spend his life lying on his stomach. Among her prizes: a washer and dryer she never requested. I have to wonder how the other woman felt about that.

As the women milled into the theater, their tickets included a card to fill out. One side was their name and information about themselves (job? married? children?) and eventually wore that side as a nametag. The other side was to describe her wish. Allan Burns, future writer who would help create The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, was a young NBC page who worked on the show. He recalled how the cards were taken at the door, then staffers would look over the hundreds while the audience, at their tables, had lunch. But if someone came in with a crutch or wheelchair, or who was clearly blind or deaf, their cards were set aside and they were never considered as contestants. The producers felt it would be tough for the other "candidates" to compete against them, but if such a person were to lose, they were afraid the show and its staff would look terrible. (Yes, I noted the irony in that.) There were other candidates whose stories were never used because they were too horrific for 1950s daytime TV, like the woman who wanted enough money to get a divorce from her abusive husband. (There were also possible legal issues with someone going on national TV and calling a man an abuser if he hadn't been charged.)

Eventually the staffers would winnow down the cards to 25 women, and Jack Bailey would interview them backstage, to gauge their stories and see how well the women would do being interviewed on TV. (Remember when I told you at the TV Land Ultimate Fan Search, how they interviewed us all on video cameras at one point? This was apparently their version of that same exercise.) From there, the list would be limited to the four or five women for the final show. They would then have to sign a release which said, among other things, if their stories were ever found to be fabricated they'd have to forfeit their prizes.



The show we'll spotlight was one of the series' "convention" shows. In fact, the show had a number of "theme shows" over the years. One July 1963 broadcast was "circus day," which opened with the models leading some show ponies around the stage as two actual clowns from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus performed. Most of their work was done at the beginning of the show, where they explained all four of the candidates that day would get free passes to the circus while it was in town. The clowns stayed throughout the show and assisted the prize models.



Occasionally the candidates would be all male and they'd select a "King for a Day." One of those (perhaps the only "King for a Day" show to still exist) from 1956 centered on newsboys. They poignantly requested things for their mothers, not themselves. One wanted furniture for his mother because his own medical bills--from when he had polio earlier in his life--ran up bills that still weren't paid off. Another wanted a freezer and a sewing machine. The winner (who apparently wanted a room added onto the family home so his brother could live with them instead of an assisted living facility) got that, plus numerous prizes showered on him that included fishing gear and even a large fishing boat that was wheeled out onto the stage, outboard motor included.

The apparently one and only existing show to be on videotape and not kinescope, from 1962, took place in an audience full of egg producers. One of the prizes for the winner was actually an egg washer. Another was a year's supply of eggs, presumably so the small-business minded folks wouldn't have to eat into their own profits when they had breakfast.

And the one we'll spotlight, apparently from February 1964 (since it happened during "National Hairdressers' Week"), is based around a convention of hairdressers, part of the National Hairdressers and Cosmetologists' Association. Bailey, standing next to a salon hairdryer, tells us this show would be a bit different than usual, as it would be devoted to the unsung heroines of beauty, the hairdresser. He pointed out how they often did unappreciated things like fix hair at hospitals and nursing homes. Then he then bellowed out a slightly altered version of his familiar opening line: "Would YOU like to be, Hairdresser QUEEN for a Day?!"



The show would then open with a pan shot of the applauding, mostly female audience as spotlights waived over the crowd at the Moulin Rouge. The opening theme, "Hey, Look Me Over," appeared to be either a celebration of the show's exploitation of poor or working-class women or a tell betraying it. Announcer Gene Baker would then introduce the show by its name and then subtitle, "the Cinderella Show," as a hand model moved cards that bore the show's title and the sponsors of the first half of the show.

The show seemed, ironically enough, to be a natural ad buy for a product devoted to hiding natural hair color, Clairol Loving Care, seen in the first commercial break. In fact, all but one of the shows that exist on the First Look Studios DVD release have their original network commercials intact (the newsboy show apparently came from Armed Forces Television), reminding us of a different era where there were so many housewives with the TV on, there was an entire industry devoted to selling them products.



During the show, Jack Bailey interviews the candidates one by one. The first, Erma Leek, tells us she's been fixing hair for 43 years, and the most she ever got for a tip was one dollar. Bailey then gets his announcer, stage manage and others to pull some money out of their wallets, so he could hand her a worthy tip for once. He then gets a plaque from the president of the NHCA, then the show goes to a commercial break for Aerowax Wax Remover and Freezone.

The next contestant is Jana Netterfield, who wants a hair dryer and shampoo bowl to be installed at Orange County Hospital, where she was once a patient and sometimes did the hair for patients. Candidate number three is Eleanor Evans, an African-American woman who wants a wedding dress for her daughter. The four candidate, Georgeena Coehlo, wants a power saw for her husband. He's out of work as a carpenter on disability and she thinks it might help cheer him up and give him something to do.



Between the interviews with the second and third candidates, Bailey brings out Jeanne Cagney, the show's fashion commentator and sister to Hollywood legend James Cagney. The fashion segment, believe it or not, started out in radio, and the "oohs" and "aahs" from the radio studio audience indicated the fashions were modeled in that studio. It's obviously a better choice for a visual medium like television, and here, they make the most of it. In this particular broadcast, Jeanne also describes the Clairol hair color on each fashion model, a nod to one of the show's billboard sponsors that day,


But she's not doing fashion commentary just for the sake of having a fashion segment. The winning queen will get all of these--designer dresses and two piece outfits, accessories including Sarah Coventry jewelry, as part of her prize package. In fact, the show lavished so many prizes on the winner the prize descriptions took up three segments of the show--and this was the first one of those.

The consolation prizes on this particular show are an electric skillet, a steam iron, and Tigress by Faberge perfume...because, the producers appeared to think, no problem was too big to be solved by even a small prize. In fact, that eventually appears to be one of the show's recurring themes: no crisis, no trauma, no living hell exists that can't be solved by consumerism.



With all four candidates sitting at the table together, we get to the part where the audience votes on which candidate is most deserving. They're put through the humiliation of the applause meter one candidate at a time, with Bailey calling out the obvious winner as "num-ber TWO!" We see the audience applaud, and an escort place a luxurious robe on her as Jack Bailey crowns her "queen for a day!" The audio booth is playing a somewhat warbly recording of "Pomp and Circumstance," indicating our queen has apparently graduated to something. What we don't see are the other three contestants, quickly shuffled off the stage and out of view of the cameras and studio audience. Behind the scenes staff members later recalled this part as a truly ugly scene, with lots of tears and weeping as their newly raised hopes are suddenly dashed. But at least they each got a steam iron.


So "num-ber TWO!" Jana Netterfield takes her place on her throne as Jack Bailey and Gene Baker take turns describing a prize package rivaling anything you'd see today on The Price is Right.  Jana will get what she requested--the hairdryer and shampoo bowl, as Bailey throws out matter-of-factly--and the fashions described in the earlier fashion segment.  Then we'ere shown a personal typewriter, a Hellbros "Queen for a Day" watch designed especially for the show's winners as a cross-promotion, her own set of beauty aids to use on herself, a whirlpool bath that turns your tub into a jacuzzi (I think they gave one away on almost every show); a lightweight portable TV (in those days before smartphones, tablets, streaming and digital TV), and a fancy canopy bed (another almost-every-show prize).


There are so many prizes they have to stop for a commercial break before getting to the big one. So, while a Feen-a-Mint commercial plays on the studio monitors, Jana has a minute to either take in everything she's won, get ready for the next part or both. Then after the break, Jack Bailey tells her she and a guest of her choice will visit the Clairol Women's Building for women only in New York. But he points out it's located on the grounds of the 1964 New York World's Fair, so they'll get to go to that too, once it opens that April. (You may recall the NBC News special in which newsman Edwin Newman claimed to be the first man allowed in that building.)


The show ends as always with the winner sitting on the throne as Jack Bailey exclaims his usual closing line: "This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make every single woman a queen for every single day!" The credits underscore how outdated this format had become even at that point in time, first the show's title appears in an ancient font, which is supposed to suggest royalty but more likely just says "old," then the modern ABC logo (which had just been adopted months earlier and is still used now) appears, looking somewhat out of place.


Indeed, ABC's daytime lineup during its last year on the air, shows how out of place the show had gotten. Its lead-in was fairly new, future daytime soap legend General Hospital, and just after the show were daytime reruns of Major Adams, Trailmaster, the retitled version of Wagon Train. So, Queen for a Day would be gone in early October. Perhaps it wasn't scheduled in the mornings with other game shows like Seven Keys or the Bill Cullen-era Price is Right because it was thought to be different category, a "miscellaneous" show like Candid Camera.

Today we would consider it "reality programming," perhaps among the first of its kind.

A dreadful show, you may say (at least if you agree with me), a prettied-up version of Social Darwinism. Even the producers would later acknowledge it years later, but justify it by saying it's what the public wanted to see...pretty much the same way people now pass around "weirdly dressed people from Walmart" pictures on Facebook, as a vicarious way of making fun of the poor. But let's be fair...the show did have its good points and perhaps, in a way, its heart was in the right place.



First of all, we can't use it as an example of "Look how much better we are now, we were soooooo politically incorrect then," because the show's format was absolutely trashed by television critics when it first appeared in the medium in 1956. And it was for the same complaints people have now: the idea of using sincere, poor to working class, women, for an exercise in Social Darwinism used as entertainment. It's the same complaints people came to make about the Jerry Lewis telethon and its use of people with Cerebral Palsy, which would later use the same Sunset Boulevard studio as Queen for a Day.

Secondly...In a 2003 article published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (I didn't even realize there was such a thing), Georganne Scheiner wrote that it basically served as a voice for women who were lower-income or working-class, a voice heard nowhere else on TV (unless you count Molly Goldberg and Alice Kramden). Except for the applause meter, the women were treated with respect, and were told America wanted to hear their stories. And we did. The show was a runaway hit for years, because people liked to see good things happen to good women, especially those who've sacrificed so hard for their families and seemed to get absolutely zip back from life. (And they still do...such later shows as Extreme Home Makeover touched, and touches, a chord in its viewers. But the closest Extreme Home Makeover got to the competitive aspect of the show was when people sent in cards, letters and emails recommending worthy families and individuals, and obviously not all of them could be fulfilled.)

Clearly the people who worked on this show thought they were doing good (despite the awful format), and the show did trade heavily on empathy and sympathy, which in this case could be a two-edged sword.



Also keep in mind, the diversity of candidates. Not only did the show pay attention to socioeconomic levels usually ignored elsewhere, and even subsets of those (who would ever think of honoring hairdressers who did hair for hospital patients?), but also exercised even more diversity. It wasn't unusual for African-Americans, Asian-Americans and others to appear as candidates, though Jack Bailey might not have been the best man to talk to them. (When a Korean woman described how she fled her country to Hawaii, Bailey wanted to know if they all speak the same language in Hawaii. This was two years before it became our 50th state.)

There were other shows of its kind back in the day as well, such as Strike It Rich, which made the recipients earn what they got through a simple quiz show format, not by playing "I've Got it Worse!" or depending on a display of pity.



Over the years, Queen for a Day crowned more than 5,000 queens with a few kings thrown in, and gave away some $29,000,000 in prizes. But out of all of that, only about ten or so TV episodes are known to exist. A home video release in 2007 claimed to have the entire series--seven complete shows and fragments from a few others--but the holdings at the UCLA film and TV archives indicate they have a few more, mostly from its last year (and my first year), 1964, that came straight from ABC. And you may think, as bad as this show is, maybe we don't need to see more than that handful. But consider this...

As Scheiner wrapped up her article, she heard from someone who hoped to find a broadcast in which her mother appeared. (That's a common request, I got a lot of them running the Classic Hollywood Squares Site.) But this one was special: this woman said her mother appeared as a pregnant woman, hoping to find baby clothes and a layette, and the baby she was carrying grew up to be the woman making the request.. Only weeks after her appearance, Scheiner says, the mother died in childbirth. It may have been the last picture or video record ever involving that woman, and because it hasn't turned up anywhere (there's a pregnant woman in one of the show fragments on the DVD release, but alas, it apparently wasn't her), it's very likely to be lost to the ages.

It's something to think about when the debate comes up about the preservation of historic TV broadcasts. What may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, even a much maligned show like Queen for a Day, could be the whole world to someone else, and their family, and their descendants. These women were not wealthy women, and those individual broadcasts, and those prizes they won to help a family get by at one point in its history, could very well have been their legacy.

Availability: the 2007 First Look Studios DVD release can still be found on Amazon and eBay. Incidentally, winners on the radio version were given audio recordings of their appearances (and one of those turned up on Youtube). There's no telling how many of those may yet turn up in attics or yard sales, but so far there are only a few here and there.

Next time on this channel: A special look at The Lucy Show's Vivian Vance, part of the TV Sidekicks Blogathon hosted by the Classic Film and TV Cafe.


This blog is a member of the Classic TV Blog Association.