Bill hosted this brief
(four episode)
series as a test of the interactive QUBE cable television
system.
Introduced in Ohio and later rolled out to Warner Cable subscribers in
other markets, QUBE allowed the home viewer to react and
respond
to live programming by pressing buttons on a special box. Hailed
as the dawning of a new age in cable television, the reality of QUBE
turned out to be low-budget and, for the most part, unimaginative local
programming that viewers mostly ignored. By 1984 the ambitious project
had been
abandoned.
The legacy of QUBE
ended up
not being its interactive element but its niche channels dedicated to
specific
audiences. Niche programming is now standard practice in cable,
and
two of the largest and most influential cable television networks --
MTV
and Nickelodeon -- trace their origins directly to Ohio and the QUBE
system.
Bill's game, like most of
the interactive QUBE games, was just awful. Two couples
competed to
predict
the results of survey questions such as...well..."How do you like your
eggs?" Bill asked the home audience to respond to each
multiple-choice
question by pressing a button on their special QUBE box, and
each
couple in turn guessed which of the five choices was the most
popular.
If successful, the couples could earn extra points by predicting the
least
popular choice. The impossible bonus round had the winning couple
rank by popularity all five choices to a question in order to win the
grand
prize -- a small color TV.
Besides being a
simplistic and slow-moving
game, the show was riddled with production errors and delays and looked
very much like a particularly ambitious local access show. Which
is just about what it was. Throughout it all, Bill remained
smooth,
funny and professional, by far (and virtually by default) the best
thing
about the program.
These special episodes
aired many
months before the official December 1, 1977 launch of the QUBE
service,
and the audience consisted of a special group of 200 cable subscribers
wired in advance for testing.
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How Do You
Like Your Eggs?
producer Howard Blumenthal (who would go on to develop such
popular
game shows as Remote Control and Where In The World Is
Carmen
Sandiego?) found our little page and, despite the mean things we
had
to say about his show, wrote us with his memories of working with Bill
and developing this odd but ambitious effort:
"In fact,
there were four half-hour
episodes produced. Pretty sure they were done on four nights in
mid-March
1977. For most of the young staff, this was our first
professional
gig; later, most of us won Peabody Awards, Emmy Awards, and the like.
But
it would be fair to say that we approached the venture with more
confidence
than experience.
"The shows
were intended to
be a test of the QUBE interactive system. Mike Dann (who had been a CBS
programmer in the 1960s) was the head of programming, and he asked us
to
include a professional host. I wandered over to NBC where they were
taping To Tell the Truth for syndication, walked down the
audience steps
in 8H, introduced myself to Bill, whom I did not know, and mentioned
Mike's
name. Next thing I knew, Bill was hosting the little test. That meant
we
needed a proper set, etc., and what started small became bigger.
"The programs
were cablecast
to a few hundred homes (I can check the exact number; it's between 200
and 500), but they were the very first interactive programs seen on US
television. And yes, there were endless production issues. When we
arrived
for rehearsals, the studio was still being wired.
"Bill was
wonderful. He was,
indeed, the best thing about our little project. And he was absolutely
fascinated by the new toy we placed in his dressing room: a home
version
of PONG. We thanked him by presenting the PONG game to
him
as a gift. In 1977, owning PONG was something to talk about."
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VIDEO
All four episodes have been
located
and preserved by QUBE archivist Jon Cornell, who worked on the
QUBE
programs back in the 1970s and today has a marvelous website devoted to
that unique programming experiment. Our great thanks to Jon for
making
those episodes available to us.
Watch
the first show: 
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Watch
an earlier run-through
(without Bill):
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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Jon Cornell's QUBE
website offers lots of candid and behind-the-scenes photos, plus more
links
to video clips.
The Eggs page at
Adam Nedeff's Bill
Cullen's World
The Eggs page on Wikipedia
Mike Burger has
info at his Game
Show Pilot Light
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