The Adenoidal Moderator

A New York adman made a few helpful suggestions last year about a new TV panel show called Down You Go. He told Producer Lou Cowan to 1) get rid of his "adenoidal moderator," Bergen Evans, 2) replace his unknown panelists with glittering celebrities, and 3) telecast the show from Manhattan instead of Chicago. Then, the adman thought, there might be a chance of finding a sponsor.

Man's Voice. This week, Down You Go is still being telecast from Chicago (Fri. 9 p.m. E.S.T., Du Mont), still has Moderator Evans and the original panel, enlivened by an occasional "name" guest. It also has a sponsor (Old Gold), an audience estimated at 16 million, and it has received an impressive 2,000,000 letters in less than a year. Last February the show went on radio over the Mutual network; this month a Spanish-language version began telecasting in Cuba, and this fall it is expected to be heard in Australia and England. Much of the credit for these successive triumphs goes to Evans, whose accent strangely combines the rural Midwest (he was born in Franklin, Ohio) and Oxford (he was a Rhodes Scholar and took his Ph.D. at Harvard). Credit also goes to the non-glittering but pleasantly intelligent panel: Editor Francis Coughlin, Teacher Robert Breen, Actresses Carmelita Pope and Toni Gilman.

Like many another TV panel show, Down You Go is based on an oldtime parlor game--in this case, Hangman. The panelists are faced with a board on which a number of blanks represent the letters in some well-known phrase, e.g., "second fiddle," "it's Greek to me," "bolt from the blue." Whenever a panelist suggests a letter not represented in the phrase, he goes "down," and $5 is forwarded to the viewer who suggested the phrase. If all four panelists go down, the viewer wins $25 and that granddaddy of quiz prizes, "a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."

Lady's Garter. Before trying to guess the letters in a phrase, the panel gets a one-line clue from Evans. These are often witty and usually to the point. Evans may spend as long as 15 hours thinking them up for a given show. Samples of his clues and the phrases they are to identify: "A tight situation in the business world, and one that seems to be growing tighter year after year" (office party); "One place in which everyone is late"(obituary column); "A man who talks in someone else's sleep" (college professor).

Now a professor of English at Northwestern University, Bergen Evans brings to TV a nicely turned academic wit and an impressive fund of miscellaneous information ("When Queen Victoria became a Knight of the Garter, she had it put on her arm, not her leg"). He first showed his debunking talents in his 1946 book, The Natural History of Nonsense, which shied irreverent rocks at some of mankind's most venerable myths. Before Down You Go, Evans made trial TV runs on several local shows, recalls that one of them was so bad it was watched "only by members of my immediate family." But last week he realized that his adenoidal high-pitched voice has finally become recognized as a TV asset: he was asked by an adman to do the commercials on another show.

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