KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

By: Douglas Wolk
April 14, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

WHEW! | 1979–1980

In the summer of 1979, I spent a few months at my grandparents’ house, where I had a great deal of time to kill. I read a lot of science fiction paperbacks and watched a lot of game shows. My favorite show was WHEW! — stylized as all caps, inside a word balloon, pronounced semi-audibly — which had just debuted that April, as part of CBS’s overhaul of its daytime schedule. It aired at 10:30 AM, and I sprinted back from swimming class every day to watch it.

Tom Kennedy (also host of Name That Tune in those days) was the host; Rod Roddy was the announcer, and later went on to the same role on The Price is Right; the show’s theme song was written by a pre-Growing Pains Alan Thicke. WHEW! had rules so convoluted that there were only four minutes of gameplay within each 25-minute episode, but it mostly involved “bloopers” — factual statements displayed on a video screen, with a crucial word replaced by an underlined joke. (Sample: “Roger Moore became James Bond in the film, ‘Live and Let Sean Connery Out of His Contract.'”) Contestants had to correctly fix a string of bloopers within a minute, which included the time it took for Kennedy to read each blooper out loud and yell “Charge!” every time they answered one correctly.

The show’s top prize ($25,000) was the highest on CBS at the time, but the look of it was unabashedly low-rent. One episode cut to a commercial while successful contestant Stephen Matthews was bouncing for joy; after the break, Kennedy explained that Matthews had thrown his knee out and been hospitalized, and would be back on the show after he recuperated.

WHEW! is apparently a bit of a cult item among game show aficionados, but until this week, I hadn’t seen it for over four decades (and incorrectly remembered that the “bloopers” were all quotations). Watching it now, I note that as a nine-year-old I had just thought it was funny — and that my junior copy-editor’s brain had loved fixing bloopers — but that I’d entirely missed how fantastically thirsty it was. Beyond the kid-friendly trappings of the Hanna-Barbera-designed cartoon villains who appeared on the set in various guises, WHEW! is all leisure suits and sneaky glances and innuendo. One final-round blooper: “Horehound is a type of lonely guy.” A contestant, prompted by Kennedy to introduce herself: “I’m a high school English teacher, I coach softball, and I go fox hunting on occasion.” “Fox hunting?! Where do you go to do that?” “Well, at singles bars.”

WHEW! became Celebrity WHEW! in November 1979, with the likes of Betty White and Jamie Farr assisting contestants. By the time I went back to my grandparents’ place the next summer, it had been replaced by reruns of Alice.

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KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

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