TV & Radio: The Wizard of Quiz

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TV's brightest new face wears an agony that in only ten weeks has grown as familiar to millions as Ed Murrow's cigarette or Arthur Godfrey's tea bag. Clamped in a vise of earphones, the eyes roll heavenward and squeeze shut, the brow sweats and furrows, the teeth gnaw at the lower lip. But the weekly torment of concentration always ends in triumph for Charles Lincoln Van Doren, 30, who has already won $122,000—more than any other quiz contestant in history—and is still going strong on NBC's Twenty One (Mon. 9 p.m., E.S.T.). Van Doren. a Columbia University English instructor who inherits the brilliance of the literary Van Doren clan, also enjoys a stranger triumph. Just by being himself, he has enabled a giveaway show, the crassest of lowbrow entertainments, to whip up a doting mass audience for a new kind of TV idol—of all things, an egghead.

Though he has never bothered to own a TV set, Charlie Van Doren now has such influence on the viewing habits of others that he may swing a major victory in the war between the two big networks. Besides cutting down Jackie Gleason—a deed performed by Perry Como—NBC has long yearned to break two other major CBS strangleholds on the TV audience: Sunday night's Ed Sullivan Show and Monday night's I Love Lucy. Last week, when Charlie Van Doren appeared as a guest on the Steve Allen Show, it topped the Sullivan show in the ratings. Nobody wanted to credit Van Doren entirely, but oddly enough, Allen had beaten Sullivan only once before—when one of his guests was Elvis Presley. Since Van Doren piled up $99,000 on Twenty One. the show has steadily shaved Lucy's lead, and the industry is standing by in anticipation of at least a temporary upset in the balance of power when the two shows again collide head-on next Monday night at 9 o'clock. "I don't say we'll catch Lucy" crowed Matthew Rosenhaus, president of Pharmaceuticals, Inc., who sponsors the show for his Geritol tonic (for "tired blood"), "but I think we're going to give her a run for her money."

Across the Board. Van Doren, whom many a grateful parent regards as TV's own health-restoring antidote to Presley, is no narrow specialist like the culinary Marine captain or the opera-buff shoemaker of The $64,000 Question, but an agile Jack-of-all-subjects. He is an engaging, curly-haired, lanky (6 ft. 2½ in., 160 lbs.) image of the all-American boy—"so likable," gushed the Chicago American's TV Critic Janet Kern, "that he has come to be a 'friend' whose weekly visits the whole family eagerly anticipates." Along with this charm, he combines the universal erudition of a Renaissance man with the nerve and cunning of a riverboat gambler and the showmanship of the born actor.

Uniquely among TV quiz shows, Twenty One is shrewdly designed to test the same odd combination of many-sided learning and the gambler's art. Packaged and owned by M.C. Jack Barry and Dan Enright, the show may pop questions in any of 108 categories of information that range across the board of knowledge. Moreover, though the contestant stakes none of his own money at the outset, he risks his winnings every time he chooses to play.