T.V. Trivia - Triple Tube!

FABULOUS FLOPS

Two weird game shows

ACROSS THE BOARD (1959)
Concept: Two contestants compete to see who can finish a crossword puzzle first. (Have you ever watched somebody else fill out a crossword puzzle? It’s pretty boring.)

CELEBRITY BOWLING (1971)
That’s pretty much it: Celebrities came on and bowled. Frequent guests included Telly Savalas, Roy Rogers, Bobby Darin, Carroll O’Connor, and Sammy Davis Jr. Amazingly, the show ran for seven years and inspired a similar show called Celebrity Tennis in 1974.

Alka-Seltzer sales nearly doubled when their commercials began showing two pills instead of one.

TV TREASURES

In 2003, Tony Alleyne put his Leicestershire, England, apartment on the market for the equivalent of about $1.7 million. Why so much? Alleyne, a Star Trek superfan, had spent years and a fortune converting the space into an intricate recreation of the starship Enterprise. By 2006, the apartment still hadn’t sold, so Alleyne filed for bankruptcy, gave up, and gutted his place of all the Enterprise stuff … and redesigned it as an intricate re-creation of the bridge from Star Trek: Voyager.

Early in Star Trek’s conception, the Enterprise was called the Yorktown.

UNSEEN TV

Unaired pilots

BAFFLED! (1973)
A race-car driver (Leonard Nimoy) gets injured in a crash and suddenly begins seeing visions of murders that haven’t occurred yet. He solves the crimes before they happen with the help of a female student of psychic phenomena.

THE TRIBE (1974)
Just a series about the day-to-day struggles of a normal family trying to survive … 40,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age, alongside a rival tribe of primitive Neanderthals.

Peter Jennings hosted a CBC radio show at age 9.