Show Business: Talking Keeps

Last Sunday night a happy glow spread across the faces of widely scattered groups of TViewers with a common enthusiasm. Keep Talking, which was pronounced dead earlier by CBS for lack of a sponsor (TIME, Nov. 10), had found a moneybags (Kent cigarettes) and slipped into the slot fled by The $64,000 Question.

Keep Talking, which began as a summer replacement, is essentially only a parlor game gone wild—but so wild that there is nothing else like it on the air. Under the cheery aegis of M.C. Carl Reiner, one contestant from each of the competing teams is offered a story. "The great surgeon went swiftly and surely about his task," Reiner will say. "Scalpel . . . suture . . . scissors . . . The tension mounted. Suddenly, a door at the rear of the operating chamber opened and a voice said . . ." At this point Reiner gleefully tosses the story at the contestant, and he encloses a small bomb in it as well. Not only must the glib gladiators continue the story—improvising alternately until cut off by a buzzer—but they must also try to work in a secret phrase that Reiner has handed them, without the opposing panel's noticing it. Typical bomb of a phrase: "I know you saved my wife's life, doctor, but isn't $300 a little high?"

Producer Herb Wolf, who thought up the show, took pains to loosen the ad-glibbest tongues in town. Among them: Comedians Joey Bishop, Paul Winchell and Morey Amsterdam, Actress Audrey Meadows, Author-Actress Ilka Chase, Actor Danny Dayton. At a dizzying clip, they twist the story a thousand fantastic ways to try to get their line in undetected, and along the way throw in every gag they can think of. (Dayton, given the suspenseful operating-room scene to work on, opened with: "Tennis, anyone?") Producer Wolf, who stands off in the wings pushing the buzzer that will transfer the story from one tale spinner to the other, has his own kind of fun. Once he pushed the buzzer on Dayton six times, waiting each time until Dayton had maneuvered the story to a point where he could inject his phrase, then cutting him off. The contestants themselves think up ridiculous sentences to throw opponents off the track. Amsterdam's favorite: "Give me two rotten eggs and an order of burned toast."

The show's pressagents highfalutinly suggest that it is a derivation from the Italian com media dell' arte, but Producer Wolf says: "Hooey. It's just something I thought up. I guess I must have played something like it when I was a kid."