Television: Bingo!

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Into TV's big bin of parlor games last week fell one of the oldest and simplest: bingo. With the legalized numbers game breaking records in New Jersey, and New York State* all set to play, Manhattan's

WABD decided that bingo would be a good bet for TV too. It was.

Opening day, thousands of housewives dropped their after-lunch chores to play, and within ten minutes some 5,000 phone callers had deluged the station's specially installed phones to ask questions or cry "Bingo!" The exchange was so badly jammed that the New York Telephone Co. pleaded with the station to stop airing the phone numbers, but within the hour 35,000 more calls flooded in. Next day the station asked winners to send in their diagrams by mail. The prizes ranged from a $500 TV set to a tankful of fish.

To play electronic bingo on the daily show, a viewer had to pick a listed phone number and write the five digits out under the letters BINGO. Then each figure was extended downward consecutively for five rows. If a player picked 7-1091, his bingo card would look like this:

By week's end WABD claimed that "a lot of people are cheating" by scanning the phone directory and locating winning numbers that would fit the winning numbers. Up came a new rule: henceforth a viewer must select phone numbers only from the column in which his own name appears.

Bingo's overnight success fits right in with TV's new rage for parlor games, which are cheap to produce and pull in good ratings. This week NBC will replace its Arlene Francis Show with a new game called Dough-Re-Mi. CBS is planning to put on Win-Go instead of The Eve Arden Show, will switch from Dick and the Duchess to Lucky Dollar, is also grooming three other games for the air.