Bittersweet Infamy - #90 - I'd Like to Phone a Friend

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

In this special episode, Taylor surprises Josie with Bittersweet Ambush, a guerrilla game show with a devious twist, before telling her about the history of game show cheating scandals, including: the quiz show fixing trials of the 1950s; the ultra-gamers that broke Press Your Luck and The Price is Right; and the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? scammers who coughed their way to the million.

Hey, sweethearts! Taylor here. In this super-sized, super-special episode, I'm going to be telling Josie all about the studded history of game show cheating scandals. But that's not all. To set the mood for the first half of the show, I've put together a little game show to ambush Josie with. But that's not all because this is an episode about cheating scandals, this game show comes packed with a devious twist. You're gonna want to stick around to find out what it is and to find out all about how people have gamed the system and won on real life game shows. So get your fingers ready to hit that buzzer and play along from home as you join us for

Episode 90 I'd like to phone a friend. Welcome to Bitter Sweet and Feet. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and in feed. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. Josie, every time I see you on this podcast, you have a different beautiful nail color and nobody at home could see it. Today they're kind of a beautiful midnight blue. Or like, is that a purple? That's more of a purple. I would say that's more of like a midnight purple or something.

I don't know what I'd call that. What would you call that? I knew the name. It was like Celestial Night, I think. That is 100% Celestial Night. I can absolutely see that. That is a Celestial Night and a half. How's that snow doing?

Turn into slush, turn into ice, freezing rain now, you know, but still nice to look at from inside. I haven't been going outside much. Get in action. You've been busy. You've got a lot of stuff. I've been very busy. In fact, I've been very busy planning today's episode as well. I'm so excited.

I know nothing. I'm blank. Usually I'm a pretty blank slate, but I am blanker than blank. Sweet. OK, I told Josie, don't bring a minfamous this time. I said, just bring a pad of paper and a pen. But I haven't told her anything else about

that and then I've been busily plucking away behind the scenes to put a little something together. Josie, I think that we can all agree as we head into a new year 2024 that the format of this podcast is stale and it's time to detonate it entirely and do something completely different. Wouldn't you agree? Sure, I mean, Stale feels a little harsh. Everybody who listens to this podcast spits on their laptop and closes it.

Cause it's Stale, it's rotten, it's funky, it's past due, the taste makers have turned on it. Article after article, have they lost it? And then the article just says yes, you can hire A.I.s to write these. And so when I was thinking about our big revamp, Josie, you like games, right? Yes.

You famously love games. Famously, I don't like them, but I'm very good at them and I win them all. If I were to present you with a new type of game, do you think that you could tackle that? Do you think you could maintain that winning streak? Okay. I have to say we had a freeze earlier and we set up a puzzle to do and every time I sit down and

get a piece I look at Mitchell and I'm like I'm crushing this. I'm gonna beat your ass so hard at this puzzle. He's like, it's a country puzzle. Get it! Get his ass! Get his ass! I'll be like, I bet you didn't know I was so good at puzzles. He's like, no, I...it's a puzzle. That's funny. The one co-op thing that you can do, and that's the one thing you're competitive about, I really respect it. But I'm ready for this game. I don't want to go too hard because you know when you just like hype too hard, you're too high up, the fall is deadly, you know? It's harder to fall from the top of the house

than it is from the first floor window. I got you. Yeah. I'm waving from the first floor window, being like, ready. Let's go. All right, awesome. So if you're ready and let's go, then, why don't we meet our other contestants?

Oh my god! Hi Dylan! Hello! Hi Dylan! Josie, this is Dylan. Hi Josie, hi. And my cats are here too. Oh, hi.

Hello. Hi Jonathan! Hi Jonathan! So, let's dive right in before we even have time to gather our bearings. Everybody? So let's dive right in before we even have time to gather our bearings, everybody? Welcome to Bitter Sweet Ambush. The game show Josie didn't even know she was going to be on. I'm your host, Taylor Basso,

and today we'll be seeing if Josie knows more about the podcast she's been hosting for four years than two total strangers. Let's do a quick introduction of our contestants. So glad I did not hit myself up. From beautiful Surrey, British Columbia, a devoted bittersweet infomaniac who you might know as until very recently, our only monthly subscriber,

it's Jonathan, big round of applause. Woo! Thank you, thank you. Honor to be here, honor to be here. From Iron Mountain on God's chosenosen Peninsula, the upper peninsula of Michigan, he's a father of four, two cats and two dogs, and a long time podcast supporter, it's Dylan. Round of applause, round of applause. And, thank you, thank you.

Finally, she might co-host the show, but how much has she retained that experience? Her undefeated streak in bittersweet infamy games is on the line, our returning champion. It's Josie Mitchell, round of applause, round of applause. So why don't we take a little bit of time, get to know our contestants a little bit better, then I'll explain how the show goes to those who might not have watched it before. You know, bittersweet ambush, it happens every week, but maybe you haven't seen it before. But first, why don't we talk to old Jonathan? Jonathan, tell me a little bit about yourself. Well, Taylor, knowing you since we were kids, we went to primary or all my school together. That's true. We've known each other since grade two. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's an honor to be on your show. I've loved it since the very first episode. It's a great tip on my knowledge of the test. You've been listening since day one. What did you do to prepare for today's taping? The last couple weeks I have been really listening to the entire back catalog. I'm actually just on the latest episode right now. You should be very well prepared for this. How much I retain rules. Anyone else? I feel like that's going to be a common occurrence among the contestants and perhaps even the host. Dylan, how you doing? I'm good. What's the weather doing in Iron Mountain today? It is cold, but sunny. And tell us a little bit about

your pets. What's what's your pet situation like you're your proud father of four? Great question. So can I do a little plug here please? I happen to be the administrator, well one of them, of the greatest cat echo on Instagram. At satchelnugget, no spaces. Check that out. Satchelnugget. At satchelnugget, you don't do your captions in that dipshit dog o-voice,

which I should say satchel. I should say satchel has a very dignified interior monologue. Yeah satchel my oldest cat writes the captions He's extremely cynical and bitchy and hateful As cats are but not like not like too much Yeah, yeah, it's just genuine it's he's just real just keep it This is my worldwide podcast debut. Woo. Oh my gosh. What better sweet infi. So I'm curious to see because I've never done this before.

How much of me gets cut out and left on the cutting room floor? I'm coming to the mixtape volume three. I'll listen to the mixtapes. They know the mixtapes, Josie. You're in trouble. These are real fans. So I have not listened to two yet, though. I'm going to be honest. That's OK.

Not a fake fan. Fake fan. If there was a question that came up about bittersweet mixed tape volume two, you'd be pretty hooped, huh? I'd probably flub it so we would cancel each other out. Don't worry, Dylan. To talk to our last contestant, Josie Mitchell, our returning champion.

Right, yeah, dog. How are you feeling? This is the first time I've really given you a platform to arrow your conscience here since I dropped these two randoms on you. How are you feeling right now? Like, I'm excited. Yeah, yeah, nervous, nervous. It's like nerves and like go cry in the shower.

It's like, which one? Ooh, so many choices. Let's amplify that feeling. I want, I want like unease in there. I want some dread. Let's make it worse. OK, turn it up. And on that note, it's time for round one, pricing the prizes.

Get your notebooks out, because I'm going to be telling you a little bit about the prizes that are up for grabs on today's episode of Bitter Sweet Ambush. Your job is to correctly identify the total value of the items that I'm about to show you. If you Americans would prefer to do it in US money, you can do it in US money. Jono, if you want to do it in CAD, you totally can. What are the stakes? The winner of this round gets to start off with a cool three points, and if they can get within $5 you get five points.

One last piece of clarification that will be showing you five items. One of these items is priceless and should not be incorporated into your total. One of these items is beyond monetary value. I won't tell you which one. You'll have to intuit it, but that is your hint. So I'm not totally screwing you guys. I'm letting you know. There's a trick question here. One of these is completely priceless. First item on the table is this five centiliters. This is a bottle of Dan Ackroyd crystal skull vodka. The history of this artifact. Josie, do you recognize this item? I recognize it from your house. You gave this to me. Josie gave this to me ten years ago and promptly forgot about it and I've had it just in my house

waiting for an opportunity to drink it. I thought my best friend's wedding would be a good occasion, but I completely forgot because I had other things on my mind, so I didn't bring it. And so now it just sits here. Taking it out of play by default. Yeah, you know what, Fair Fox 2, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. I would have to put them in a little ziplock bag when they ran it through TSA And you didn't check a bag so you get all around that I didn't bring it and now it will go to the winner of today's competition

The cost for this. It's just a little shot-sized crystal skull Danakroyd I keep saying Danakroyd because why not vodka now this is a vintage Collectors item these are film passes, but they are not just any film passes. These are film passes to the anniversary showing of sex killer in 2013 This dreadful time in my history was documented in episode 54, Sexcula. I went all into it then, it's a locally produced vampire porn. I'm gonna actually ask you, I held up a pair of them for effect, but I'm actually gonna say this is the ticket price for one Sexcula ticket, not two, in today today's money and this does not include a film festival

membership so we're just looking at the sticker price for this piece of cinematic history one ticket no concessions no popcorn no concessions no popcorn no handjob in the back just the ticket a bargain at any price though for that one. Oh, they couldn't pay me enough to do it again. There was no amount of money I would do it for. I guess I just did it again for a free-fist podcast. Item number three. This is a rainbow squid hat.

Do you have any recollection, either of you, as Bitter Sweet Infamy fans of this rainbow squid hat. Do you have any recollection either of you as Bitter Sweden for me fans of this rainbow squid hat? It has been in an episode before. I do. You wore it on your camping trip in the so far now. Look at these bags, Josie. You're fucked. I will disclose that I got this right before Josie and I went on our Vancouver trip for the podcast and I got it from a nearby dollar store used loosely, not every item in there was a dollar. Obviously this was not a dollar,

but it was a dollar store that was going out of business and this was hanging on the shelves and making googly-eyed eye contact with me and I simply couldn't resist. And so I purchased it and immediately I put it on and immediately ran into my employer on the way home This could be yours if you know how much I paid for this rainbow squid hat Very comfy very nice. That's a good question though Jonathan because if it's fairy prices, yeah It would have been double. Yeah. Yeah. These are all good That's why I was checking. I'm very impressed by everybody's retention gameplay so far

These are all good. That's what I was checking. I'm very impressed by everybody's retention gameplay so far. Item number four is the yellow and black jumpsuit that I wore to karaoke right before Josie's wedding, which I purchased at a vintage store in Vancouver and then wore to a party before Josie's wedding. And then the last item, Josie, do you, you will recognize this certainly. Yeah, yeah, that's a comforter I lost my virginity on. This is the comforter that Josie lost her virginity on. The story behind this item, Josie was getting rid

of some things and she was getting rid of this comforter and she mentioned that she had lost her virginity on it. And I, because I'm a, by the way, in trawling around my shit for like Josie related artifacts, I've realized I'm like a weird stalker of you. I've got like clippings from your shows. I'm very sweet, but I'm crazy.

And so Josie was getting rid of this sacred virginity shroud and I said- I washed it. Gotta have it. I've got a, I wish you hadn't. I sue. I said- I know you haven't, but.

I said, give it to you. And so now this is, I regularly use this as a picnic blanket as putting something down on the floor so we can record episodes 41 and 42 on this. So this final item is Josie's virginity blanket. From Urban Outfitters. From Urban Outfitters. It's a red, red, purple detail.

Alright. You can go put it back on your Josie tracks. Yes, yes. Yes, it's got pictures of Mitchell with fish hooks through the eyes. So, again, to reiterate the rules, you are attempting to add up the total cost in the monetary unit of your choosing of the small bottle, the like shot-sized bottle of Crystal Skelvodka, one ticket to Sexcula, the rainbow squid hat, the karaoke party jumpsuit, and Josie's virginity blanket.

As a reminder, one of these items is priceless and cannot be assigned a monetary value and will not be factored into the overall total. Please take your time to write down your total and let me know when you're finished and then we'll go from there. I'm confident. I'm very confident actually. Okay. Josie are you ready? It's ready as I'll be. Yeah. Okay well since Dylan since you're so confident why don't you start us off. What did you write down for the total value of these items? Okay, obviously the blanket is priceless.

Okay. So I got the easy part. This is funny. I did not do this on purpose at all. I did each item. I settled on a price before I went to the next one. My total is $69. In America or in India?

In America. Okay. America. 69 American. All right. That's good. Look at that. Jono will go to you next. What was your price for these items?

I finished with $59 Canadian. I was assuming the blanket was when it was new. So I went with like a new comfort. And so what was your priceless item? I went with the film pass. This is no paper. Oh fair enough. That's good logic.

They were probably giving them away. That was my heart. That was my heart. That was my heart. But the blanket. My brain back. So 59 Canadian. All right. All right.

And Josie, what do you get? I got a hundred and eleven dollars Canadian. Oh, wow. I went to Canadian. We went Canadian. Oh, yeah. My my priceless item was the blankie to Dylan. I said that.

Okay. Of course. Of course. There's a big rip in the middle. I gave it to him with it. the blanky too, Dylan. I said that. Okay. Of course, of course. There's a big rip in the middle. I gave it to him with it. You know. Oh yeah, oh yeah. This thing is in a fucking, it should not

be a prize on a game show. It is a shamel. Nobody got within $5 in their currency. So only three points will be given out to the winner of this round, whoever was the closest. I can confirm that the priceless item was, of course, Josie's virginity blanket. Once Josie got the pipe in that, it became its superseded value. Second.

No worries, love you. Second. Second. Second. Second. In Canadian currency, the Crystal Skull Vodka was $1347, sexula $14.22 for one ticket, the Rainbow Squid Hat, it was originally $20 and marked down to 10 because the store was closing. $65 for the jumpsuit at a vintage store and then rounded up and converted to USD. The total value of the items was $77 US or $103 Canadian. Oh wow.

So this is interesting. You're actually both, now that I look at it, in your respective currencies. Very close. You're both within $8, Dylan and Josie. Dylan didn't go over. The price is right bitch, this is bittersweet ambush. Fuck the price. That's fair. Fuck you, fucker.

I always thought that was a dumb rule, I don't like that rule. So now I'm in the position to do something about it bitch, so I will. I'm gonna say that even though I think that question is marginally tilted because the price difference is so steep, I am just gonna go ahead and give both Dylan and Josie three points. All right. All right. No shout out for me. All right. So with round one in the tubes, we are looking at three points, Josie, three points, Dylan, zero points, Jonathan. It's going to make it up in the next round. That's okay.

You'll have the opportunity to make it up in round two. Are you all ready for to go into round two? Yep, yeah. Beauty. Round two is called Bitter Sweet History. This is general knowledge trivia about Bitter Sweet Infamy. It may have to do with the things that we said on the show and the subjects we discussed on the show, unnotable things about particular episodes. When you write down your answer, I will accept the gist.

As long as I know what you're getting at, I'll know whether you're right or wrong. So don't put too much pressure to get things exactly right. I have to say the pressure feels a little bit off, because I've already lost. Like I'm co-host, and I'm playing the game and I've lost. If I'm a contestant, if I'm not automatically disqualified because I'm a co-host, then I have lost. No, don't say that about yourself.

That is negative self-talk and that is not allowed on BitterSuite Ambush. It was in your contestant contract. We will have to remove you from the show. This is a DQ, this is a breach. To clarify the stakes, each question in this round, unless otherwise stated, is worth one point for a total of 10 if you get them all right. There will be opportunities within the questions

to earn additional points, and I will point those out. As noted, we have 10 questions. Question number one, in episode number 70, finding the groove. I disclosed my two favorite Disney movies. Name either one for a total of one point per movie. If you can name both name both. Johnno what was your answer? A great mouse detective. I was blanking on the second. That's okay. Dylan what'd you write?

When John just said that I remembered it immediately but I didn't write it. I was blanking on the second. That's OK. Dylan, what'd you write? When John just said that, I remembered it immediately, but I didn't write it. I wrote Mulan and Herculees. OK. Josie. I did just one not because I was confident because she couldn't think of anything else, but I did the like one of the five-hole and American tale. So thinking mouse wasn't right.

The correct answers were the three Caballeros and the Great Most Detective. So that's one point for Jonathan. Question two. The image of Momo of the Momo Challenge is actually an artist's depiction of what type of folkloric Japanese spirit? Fuck, what is it called, I do. Jonathan's shit in the bad, he finally made it to the hot seat and now he's panicking. No, I'm trying to remember the name of it now.

Yeah, that's what I mean by you're panicking. You don't know. You're trying to remember. You're not helping Taylor, no. I know. I'm like old hair dye Jeff Probst, I want to get it. She's letting the whole team down. Pick it up. You know, I said it was like a scorned woman, like a vengeful. Okay. He did on angry. I might be willing to give out a point for that, depending on how everyone else does.

Okay, I can't. Jono. I went with only but I couldn't remember. Okay. Josie, what did you get? I just put like house spirit. You're all kind of shooting in the ballpark, but the word I was looking for was yokai. You're all kind in the ballpark and so I've decided to reward none of you. No change in choice.

We all canceled our points out. Question three. On this show, we are ardent supporters of the MLB team, the San Diego Padres. In which episode did we first utter the timeless phrase, go pods? Oh man, that goes backwards. I am drinking from my Padres mug, yo. Yo, go pods! Why don't we start this time with Josie? Josie, what did you write? The Betty Broderick episode.

Episode 6, Betty and Dan Broderick. What was your logic there? It was my first San Diego episode. I recorded it in San Diego, so there was like this element of hometown turf, Padres. Got it. That's a logical way to go about it. You would think it would be true. Dylan, what did you write? Well, my logic was if you were true fans, you would have mentioned it in episode one.

Oh, damn! Episode number one. Episode number one. Good pick. If we really love the podgers, it's like we say we do. Straight for the eyes! And, Jono, what did you write? I was trying to remember the episode name, but it was episode 45 and I was probably the nicest killer. I think that's Bernie, right?

Bernie, yes. The nice killer round. I can tell you, Josie, your logic was absolutely spot on. It was the Betty Broderick episode, our first San Diego episode. Okay. That puts Josie in the lead in this podcast about her own life. See, I'm telling you, I've already lost. Four to three to one. life. See, I'm telling you, I've already lost. 4-3-1. Question number 4. In episode number 78, Brother 12 of The Great White Lodge, Josie and I have an extensive conversation about actor Kim Ketral, in which we determine that

she grew up in which BC city, Lady Smith or Courtney? I think I fucked this up in the episode. We both did a bunch of times. This is your chance to redeem yourself. Ah! OK, why don't we start with Jonathan? I wrote down, I wrote with Courtney. OK, what did you go with Dylan?

I went the other way. I went Lady Smith. Lady Smith, OK, and what did you go with Josie? I did Courtney, BC. Majority has it. Courtney is correct. Pam Anderson is from Lady Smith. That's Lady Smith, okay.

Oh no, I'm slipping, okay. The score is Josie 5, Dylan 3, Jonathan 2. Okay, I'm fine. Question five. Dylan, I think you'll like this one. Okay, okay. If you listen to the bittersweet mixtape volume two, If you listen to the bittersweet mixtape volume two,

you will know that I got a gold medal at the Guilford Mall Science Fair in the sixth grade. What was the subject of the celebrated and influential science fair project that won me that award? And I will give you one point if you know the vague subject and two points for the exact name Got it. Jonathan you went to elementary school with me. Yeah, I did that science fair I was I was actually also in the gym. I never went to Guilford, but I did go to the gym as well I did photosynthesis, but he did not like you didn't do it very well if you didn't go to Guilford, bud apparently

This is just so slanted against me. Whatever. Dylan, I gotta say that mixtape volume two is like, it's pretty fly. It's pretty fly and you can listen to it for free at coffee.com. Okay, so why don't we start with the person who did not listen to the mixtape? Dylan, what was your answer here? I've always thought I was a little bit psychic, so we're gonna find out.

Oh, good! This is the best answer. Psychic through the zoom lines. Mm-hmm. Right, I'm not gonna, I don't think I need to show you my answer, but I'll just tell you the general subject was archeology. Yeah, okay.

And specifically you found a T-Rex skeleton. God. Personal. It's gonna be hard personally. It's gonna be hard to beat those psychic connections. Let's see what the rest of the group said. Jonathan and Josie both answered quite confidently there. Jonathan, what'd you write? Oil Frenderfoe.

Oil Frenderfoe, Josie, what'd you write? Oil Frenderfoe. So Oil is famously a foe to Tyrannosaurus skeletons who become it but other than that Dylan I'm afraid that they both get two points you are gonna be stuck on three it is scores now Josie seven Jonathan four Dylan three yeah Oil of a life ballpark all types of oil All different types we'll see What was your conclusion? Was it

a gray area or just a little? Oh, who can say? It was something like no one can tell, no one knows. We'll have to wait and see. There are no friends in science! Exactly! These are human conceits. Question 6. Back in episode 34, Ketzel Kowaddle is coming to town. Listeners were introduced to professional wrestling's answer to Santa Claus, his evil twin who lives at the South Pole and takes gifts from children. What was this character's name? Shit. Oh, oh, oh, oh, I think I know.

Oh, you love to hear it. I might know it. Believe in yourself. No negative self-talk. I do know this. I will achieve this. I have manifested this. Why don't we start with you, Jonathan? I just wrote down Krampus. I know it's not Krampus.

It's not... Oh, thank you so much. I shouldn't give it away. No, it's not Krampus. I don't fuck it. I took my own hat. I couldn't remember that. I took it too. I'm a loser. Okay, Dylan, next. What do you got?

Okay, so the first thing that popped in my head was crampus. But I was like, no, it's not crampus. And then I was thinking thinking, I think it was Santa Claus. Santa Claus with an X. Josie, what do you got? I think that is it. I did Santa with a Z. All right. All right. It is in fact, Santa with an X. Since Dylan is behind, I'm gonna give the point to him and only him, because he's the only one who is correct. Oh my god, that's good. That's good, yeah. So we're now seven, four, four.

Josie's still in the lead. Question number seven of round two. Attentive listeners will know that we often leave snippets, outtakes, and other pieces of hidden audio after the end credits. So stick around. We often leave snippets, outtakes, and other pieces of hidden audio after the end credits, so stick around. What played after the end credits of episode number 58, The White House Party Crashers? Just describe it.

You don't need to know the exact names of anything, just describe what it is. This is the episode about Tariq and McKell Slahey from the Real Housewives of DC who crashed Barack Obama's inaugural state dinner. I remember the episode, I don't remember if I heard the outro. All right, why don't we start with Jonathan? What was at the end of that episode? I just said the real Housewives' Deep Song. I don't think that's right, dude.

That's a good guess. I was going to say something along those lines. I don't think I actually listened to this. I'm totally guessing. And then I second guessed myself when I wrote the national anthem. The national anthem. Yeah. Because that was one of our greatest moments.

OK. Wow. Confirmed. Wow, wow, wow. No, I love it. I love it. I love it. And Josie, what did you write?

I wrote a clip of the s'la'he's describing the event. The correct answer is it was a clip of Mikele Slahy's pop song Bump It. Oh, of course. Yes, she did the bumper. Which for? Is my national anthem. That's as the real national anthem. Alright, question eight.

In episode 54, Sexcula. Taylor told the story of a piece of vampire- pornography about the titular pun intended count is sex killer Name or describe any character from this film other than sex killer. I Talked about that movie. I gave you a fucking blow-by-blow pun very much Yeah, of that fucking movie. I told you everything about that movie in far too great detail. Name any, name or describe any character from it, any of them. Prove to me that it was worth my effort. Please, I beg you. Why don't we start with Dylan? Because he seems like, based on his reaction, most likely to get it wrong. So let's get him out of the way first.

That is usually a good idea. Yeah. So I remember this episode, I very much enjoyed it. Yeah. A lot of it was more than the characters, was like your inner sense of despair. Yeah, that's true. That's very true. I racked my brain for a name, came up blank. So I said there must have been a sexy nun.

So this is a good guess. This is a good guess. A sexy nun is very in line with what this film had to offer. But was there a sexy nun? In reality, not sexy, but you know, met her taste. Sexy is a sexy does. Yeah. She was not actually in sex killer. That is incorrect. Okay, John. What do you got? So yeah, I also enjoyed the episode greatly. I also love the sense of overwhelming dread that was coming over you as you watched this movie. Terrible moment in my life, absolutely.

I remember the gist of like the story of behind the movie, but God, I couldn't remember the name of a character. I just said the priest who has sex with a lady vampire because I feel like there was a priest somewhere in there. Okay, so there is definitely a priest. We do not see the priest have sex with a lady vampire. I'm gonna say I'm willing to accept the priest. Yes. Josie, what did you write for your answer? I wrote the woman in the frame story having a picnic?

Yes, there was a terrible frame story about a woman having a picnic that is absolutely correct. I'll give you a point for that as well. Okay, because I just remember being kind of like why is there a frame? Like there's no me for this frame. That's what stuck in my head. The literary crime's committed. The crime's against writing. Yeah that's what I take away from the porn. It's like the frame story. Josie with eight points, Jonathan with five points, Dylan with four points, having lost his Xantaclawz lead tragic turn of events. Question number nine out of ten.

In episode 20, One Taste. T Street composer Brian Steele contributed the idea for the Minfamous, which centered around the addiction and recovery of which 20th century jazz musician. Why don't we start with Josie this time? Josie, who did you put? I put John Coltrane and it's not. OK, John, what did you write? I know what's wrong because I can't think of a real

view of lose musicians. I put down bleeding gums Murphy for the. Since. What? That's. Oh, I couldn't. I couldn't really get over her depression. What a guy.

Yeah. Dylan, who do you got? So I was in a jazz band as a trumpeter for seven years. Has anything to do with this? I do like the reason that I breathe. I hope. Sorry, go ahead. But I'm mad now because I think Josie got it too. I wrote Coltrane. It is in fact John Coltrane that is correct. Well done. Josie has nine points. Dylan has five points, Jonathan has five points, so Josie has a tidy lead going into our final question of the Trivia Round.

Question number 10, speaking of T Street, name the only episode not to feature the Bitter Sweet Infamy theme song. In the history of bittersweetinfamy, there has only been one episode that does not feature T Street in any capacity at all. Which episode was it? Is it this episode? That's not fair. No. Okay. No. Let's start with Dylan, because you were scrounging around at the end there, right in your stuff

in. What do you got? So, I'm actually returning to logic I used earlier in the game. I don't think, no, if it's right, I guess episode one. Episode one, interesting. Maybe we didn't have everything locked in yet. I think it's there. Interesting. I don't remember. That's a good logic. Yeah. Jonathan, you seem quite confident in the opposite direction.

You said no, episode one had T Street. You're sure about this. I'm pretty sure it did. So what didn't then, if you're so smart? I went with Fight the Real Enemy, Sibeto Connor. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. That's a good guess. Maybe just add a bunch of her music instead. Okay. And what about you, Josie? I put the, now I'm like, oh, was that your Minfimus? But the Where in the World in North Dakota, the video game one? That was my Minfamous. That was my Minfamous for the episode about Havana syndrome.

Okay, okay. For some reason I was thinking that, cause I do remember that being the clip, but I think that was the interstitial, wasn't the- Yeah, the interstitial music comedy video, yeah. All right, we're ending on a wet fart here. Everybody wrong. Nobody right?

That's unfortunate. The correct answer is episode number 83, a house that eats girls, starts with the wedding march, and then the interstitial. The interstitial music are Uncle Cracker and the theme from house, and we end on the theme from house. T-Street Never Acquires.

Right, of course. That's right. Do you wanna hear something really sad? What's that? I listened to that episode last night. You dumb bitch. You stupid bitch. Right, of course. That's right. Do you want to hear something really sad? What's that? I listened to that episode last night. You dumb bitch. You stupid bitch. Thank you for listening.

Yeah, thank you so much. That's a long episode. Awesome. Thank you. So, as we leave round two, the scores stand at our guests, Jonathan and Dylan, with five of peace, trailing our legendary Games Master and undefeated champion of games, Josie Mitchell at nine. However, there are two more rounds to go.

There's around three and around four. And we are very excited to get to those after this word from our commercial sponsors, everybody clap, everybody clap. Hey, hey, it's Donna from Daily Dose of Donna. Everybody clap, everybody clap. Woo-hoo! Hey, hey, it's Donna from Daily Dose of Donna. Every weekday afternoon on the Daily Dose of Donna podcast, I cover all of the reality TV and celeb gossip and breaking news. I'm a former TV casting director, my husband works in reality TV,

and I live for the housewives, the sister wives, the southern charmers, and the summer houseers. And let's be honest, all of the drama. I'll give you a day's worth of celebrity and reality news weekday afternoons in just under an hour. New episodes of Daily Dose of Donna post weekday afternoons and are now available in video on Spotify. Subscribe to Daily Dose of Donna.

That's D-A-N-A on your podcast app. Taylor Basso here on Bitter Sweet Ambush. We are back from an electrifying first two rounds that see Josie currently outpacing her competitors, Dylan and Jonathan, but anything can change in the next round. Round three is worth a big five points for anyone who gets the round three stumper correct

and the round three stumper comes of course in the form of our beloved April Fool's Factor Fiction, Minfamous. Yes, April has come early this year, about 3 months early. I'm going to be telling you all two brief stories. One of them is real, one of them is fake. I want you to write down the one that you think is fake. Story number one. One of them is fake, I want you to write down the one that you think is fake. Story number one.

The guarda, the Irish police, were left scratching their heads at one of the country's most prolific criminals, the Polish speed demon Prawo Jazdy, who was recorded committing over 50 traffic offenses on the Emerald Isle. However, a keen eyed member of the Garda was forced to issue a somewhat embarrassing internal memo, the prolific plague of the highway, Prawo Jazdy, did not in fact exist. Prawo Jazdy, it turns out, is Polish for driver's license. The error occurred due to the large text of the words Prawo Jazdy on the EU driver's license compared to the smaller and easier to miss field for the driver's name.

This red-faced internal memo was then leaked via email, which is how we all know about the legendary exploits of the Polish outlaw Prawo Jacy. That's story number one. Does it have the ring of truth? Does it have the ring of falsehood? You always need to hear the second one though, right? Before you make your decision. So why don't we go? Story number two. And you'll notice by the way a common theme are our stories today I'll take place in the Emerald Isle. The Museum of Likeness is a wax museum in Ennis Cary County, Wicklow, Ireland. The wax works are from my observation quite good but the museum is not infamous for the

quality of its work rather it is known for the many misadventures of its statue of Queen Elizabeth II, nicknamed Lucky Lizzie. From the 1970s through the 2010s, it was local tradition for anti-monarchists to sneak into the museum at night, kidnap the statue, and restage it in public, often nude, frequently in the midst of various unqueenly acts. Alas, bad apples ruined it for everyone when a stunt with fireworks did significant damage to the statues faced in Armand 2012, the Museum of Lightness's update security at considerable cost. Lucky Lizzie has been repaired and now sleeps in a special

fortified room every night. That story too. I want that to be true. Wanting it isn't enough. You can't want something. I know. It's called a vision board, Taylor. That's true. I am an ardent believer in the secret. I should take that back, right? Which is not true? Is it Lucky Lizzie that's unsure? Is it Bravo Yazzie that's unsure? Okay, I'm not even going to spell the names. I just wrote down the Irish drivers.

This is one. Okay. Dylan, what do you think? Same. I wrote number one. It's the fake story. Okay. Now it'll be interesting to hear what Josie says because as we know her record in this

domain is impeccable and she can see through my bullshit with X-ray vision. Josie, what do you got? I think Lucky Lizzie is fake. I think the wax museum figure is fake. Josie, you've done it again. You are correct. Oh, damn. The wax.

Lucky Lizzie is fake. Never happened. The Irish police did, in fact, have a 50-odd warrants out for a guy whose name was just driver's license and polish. And of course, in the end, it's 50 different drivers. We have an interesting conundrum here, boys, and I wonder what you think we should do. We had to bet your own points and we can't catch up going into the final round here. But the current score is yeah, Josie is at 14. Jonathan, you're at five Dylan, you're at five. So hypothetically, she's just nothing, you know, has this.

If she just work, she could express how confident she is by betting at all. And we'll all bet it all. Would you be willing to go all or nothing? Josie and in the name of drama name of drama you be willing to go all or nothing in the final question. Let's go Let's fucking go all right What if I wish is like no, I would like I want to reserve my Content reserve my great content. I would, I would, I would try to like, I would try to gently prod you toward considering again.

That's too good. No, no, no, but I like a wholeheartedly, wholeheart, no heart all in. Let's go. All right, let's do it. We call this final round the bittersweet reveal. The category is Young Taylor. The question is this. As revealed in episode 18 of the podcast, what is the name of my childhood pet goldfish?

Yeah, that is a deep cut. That is a deep cut. Dude, can we get the title of episode 18? Yeah, that is a deep cut. That is a deep cut. Yeah, dude. Hi, yeah, yeah. Can we get the title of episode 18? Fatal Insomnia. OK. Yeah, OK, yeah, yeah. That's a terrifying episode, but yeah, I remember that. I feel like I remember this.

I brought you both on as bittersweet infamy experts and good friends and Josie showing her bittersweet infamy expertise in her performance. Oh, but the goldfish, dude, the goldfish. It's the all or nothing goldfish. Sink or swim! Final answers in coming. The prizes on the line. A yellow jumpsuit. Already worn. A bespoiled Already worn a bespoiled Comforter An old non-valid ticket to a porn in a movie theater

Some Dan Ackroyd crystal-head skull vodka and a squid hat all on the line here These are the stakes the stakes have never been higher All right, so why don't we start why don't we start with Dylan because Dylan, I think that you perhaps answered the most confidently in my observation. Okay, I am an animal lover. Yes, you are a friend to the animal kingdom, a regular Mr. Doolittle. I'm like, oh, you know, podcasts, human drama, societal issues, kind of, tune out, baby gold fish, I come right back. I think his name was Baby A. Jacks.

I love the baby Ajax. A delightful little drawing of a fish. A great likeness, I would say, to my childhood goldfish. It was like you were there. R.I.P. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think you had it before you ever met me, but I'm trying to remember. I couldn't. I think you might have mentioned it or once or twice. We used to go to school together, but I also said.

What is baby Ajax? You went full jeopardy rules. Yes. So Josie We've got two our two visiting scholars have recalled baby Ajax in the ether a strange name to pull if they're both mistaken Yes Well, that was not my guess so that was not your guess. What was your guess? Um, I couldn't I couldn't remember but for some reason the name Duncan came to mind. That's so cute. It's a good name. It's a good name for a fish. It is not the correct name the correct name was baby Ajax which means which

means Josie you've won congratulations. Wait didn't I all or nothing it though? Josie, I'm afraid I haven't been totally honest with you. The object of the show was never to see how much you knew about Bitter Sweeten for me. The real objective of Bitter Sweet Ambush was to present you with an opportunity to cheat at a game show and see if you would take it. The Ambush is another Ambush? It's an ambush within an ambush! It's the bittersweet reveal. Sister duck out of ambushes.

I know you're confused so let me explain. While Dylan and Jonathan have been playing every round except the final round honestly, they have of course been in on the scam since the beginning. When we had our brief break between rounds 2 and 3, I made sure they lingered away from the computer a little bit longer than you did. When we were alone, I sent you the link to our Google Drive under the pretext of showing you the game show music that I'd selected for this segment. Do you want to hear some of the music that I pulled for this?

Yeah. I will plunk it in our discord. In the file, along with the music, were various other files, including one clearly labeled Bitter, Sweet, Ambush, Answer Key. I left the bait in plain sight with two questions in mind. One, will Josie even notice this file? Two, if so, will she be tempted to open it? Did you notice the file? I noticed that you had like a run of show and I looked, I like glanced at stuff

and I was like, wow, Taylor's been working really hard on this. This is really cool. But I don't think I clapped like a clear answer sheet. We'll get to that. Okay. So there's, this is, this is an outcome I plan for. To get to the question you might be asking, how would I know for certain if she opened it? By ensuring that the final question was completely fraudulent with a nonsense answer she could only know by cheating and looking at the answer key. Josie, there was no baby Ajax. Was there a fish at all? No.

Fuck it! There was never baby Ajax. Was there a fish at all? No. Fuck it! No. There was never that discussion. Fran wasn't there. None of that happened. I was like what? I guess maybe talking about Insomnia, you had memory of a fish?

No, didn't happen. Okay, okay, okay. Baby Ajax. Baby Ajax, baby. Code word for ambush. There is no game show. There are no prizes. Everything from the other contestants to the background music has been a flimsy pretext.

Although they did play the game, other than that final question, I instructed them to play the game, honestly, which I probably shouldn't have because you kicked their ass. You did. You absolutely destroyed us. Why would I go to all of this trouble to humiliate my best friend and ear shot of hundreds of listeners? That is, of course, to introduce my story for Episode 90, a non-exhaustive history of game show cheating scandals. Oh my god. I have like fucking whiplash too.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Are you okay? I'm sorry. No, I'm fine. I got what I... I hope this is like a good surprise and not like an ever ruin the trust between us surprise.

I'm shocked and I'm shocked in the fall. I did the true sports in even never. Oh my goodness. Wow. First of all, of course, obviously, thanks so much to both Dylan and Jonathan for participating. Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure being here. This is very impressive.

And thank you for putting in all the work to help us get ready for that. Yeah. I want to give a big thank you to Jonathan Mountain for the suggestion both for a particular game show scandal that I'll be covering as well as the idea to cover multiple of a thing, because I'm going to be covering multiple game show scandals. Yeah. And thank you obviously for being here and participating. Thank you both for your suggestions. And since to thank you for being here,

we want you to be the first to know that for the month of February, we're going to be going weekly with our bittersweet romance block of, it's going to be love story themed and we're going to be doing some fun stuff to do with that so you can look out for a new episode every week to study up for your repeat appearance on the show when you finally get your revenge. Oh, I love it. Can't wait. I just want to say thank you guys both for putting on this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to listen to and I just, I love listening to it.

So thank you guys so much for all the hard work you put into it. Oh, so sweet. Thank you. Yeah, same. Sorry, I don't listen carefully enough apparently, but I do love the show. No, just let it wash over you, dude. Yeah. You're famous now. You're a celebrity.

You can start treating people much worse. I just want to reiterate what I told Taylor earlier, which was, if I win, it's because I was trying to win, and I'm just a big fan. If I lose, it's because I was trying to give some comic relief. And I'm not sure did we win. We all won. We all won.

We all won. Yeah. Yeah, we all won. I'm so excited to have you all on the show again. Come back. Y'all take care and before you go, can you say stay sweet, Bothea? Stay sweet. Stay sweet.

Hey, hey, it's Donna from Daily Dose of Donna. Every weekday afternoon on the Daily Dose of Donna podcast, I cover all of the reality TV and celeb gossip and breaking news. I'm a former TV casting director, my husband works in reality TV, and I live for the housewives, the sister wives, the southern charmers, and the summer houseers. And let's be honest, all of the drama. I'll give you a day's worth of celebrity and reality news weekday afternoons in just under an hour.

New episodes of Daily Dose of Donna post weekday afternoons and are now available in video on Spotify. Subscribe to Daily Dose of Donna. That's D-A-N-A on your podcast app. Hey, this is Josie of Josie and Taylor of the Bittersweet Anthony podcast. Are you itching for more bittersweetness? Visit our coffee page and become a monthly subscriber to get full access to bittersweet exclusives, including the Bittersweet Film Club.

In this month's Bittersweet Film Club, Taylor and Josie are joined by Mitchell Collins to discuss Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, among some other things. NikoBak is not over, so for the record, Chad Kroger runs the 604 record label, which is the host of the 604 podcast. Daddy Chad.

We love Daddy Chad. This is at Nickelback Save Space. Thank you. And haters, if you don't like that, we invite you to look in this phone room. Thank you. Thank you, Daddy Chad. Visit ko-fi.com slash bittersweet-ymthamy.

So what did you think of that fun little surprise? So many fucking layers dude. I'm still like- Those eight surprises that I laid on you all in a row there. Yeah, just a lot of feeling swirling and I'm still trying to like capture them from the ether to examine. If it makes you feel any better, I did that with the full knowledge that there was no way in hell even if you noticed the file that you would cheat. I was prepared for if you would cheat, but I didn't think you would. I didn't! We talked about it.

We had different things. And so with that in mind, I have the, of course, this Plan C. Plan C in a box, carefully. What does that say on the back of this card? Plan C, in case Josie does not see the file. What is Plan C? We will reveal it at the end of today's program. Oh, oh, okay.

So there's a little bit of an incentive to keep listening. If it's non- incentive enough, why don't I tell you about some of the greatest, and non-exhaustive, of course, you know, there's lots of great game show scandals. I want to tell you about some of the greatest of all. Fucking setup setup dude. I'm so overwhelmed. It was just like such an adventure. We reached our capacity record for Bittersweet Infamy.

Yeah. This is what I feel like. I feel like I've been in a submersible, like going down to the ocean floor, and then we went up really fast. Like that's how I feel. And now you have the bends. I have the bends. Now you have the bends. I have the bends. Now you have the bends.

Other than whatever may be in the mystery box in plan C, there's no further unpleasant surprises to come. It's a standard episode of Bitter Sweeten for me again, so you can just unwind. Yeah, wow, wow. I'm just, I'm impressed. I'm so impressed. Thank you, thank you.

I did my best, I really tried. I do try sometimes. Yeah, and there's Thank you. Thank you. I did my best. I really tried. I do try sometimes. Yeah. And there's no fucking baby Ajax, dude. There's no baby Ajax. There never was.

There never was. Have you ever had a fish? I've had fish. I've had goldfish. We had the fish tank. It wasn't the type of thing that we named them, I don't think, particularly. We just had fish in a tank. I'm going to send you a fish.

Sweet. Can't wait. Baby Ajax. That'll be exciting. In the. Sweet, can't wait. Baby, just. In the meantime, why don't we go back to the 1950s and I'll tell you about a show called the $64,000 question. Okay. And I should let you know that again, I'm doing this because there was so much prep work that went into this. I'm doing this one Josie style. No script, just notes. So if it's a little bit different than my usual style, that's why.

I love an omnibus too, I gotta say. Yeah, this is a good omnibus. Yeah, yeah. And we're taking the bus all the way to Omni on this one. Yeah, yeah. Good idea, Jonathan. Have you ever heard of these like 1950s quiz show scandals that start with the $64,000 question, and they move on to $21? I've heard the shows, but I haven't heard of the scandals. No, no. Oh, okay, so this is really interesting. You'll like this, you'll like this.

1950s television is brand new. Yeah, the height of the game show, yeah. Yeah, oh yeah. TV, brand new, quiz shows, massive, like smashing, young ratings records, because this is the day when those like fucking five channels, you have a good show, you can get like 60% of the TV audience, right? Yeah, yeah. And so the ratings are huge, the entire technology is huge, it's new.

We're very much in a time of like trusting what you see on television, the idea that someone on television could be lying to you, hadn't really entered the conversation yet. Right, yeah. Which obviously makes it very easy for things like, what we're gonna be talking about in the 1950s is basically, we get to a point of entirely choreographed game shows, like the professional wrestling equivalent of game shows, where every move is sort of staged in advance.

But it doesn't start that way. The rigging kinda starts with the show, the $64,000 question. This is sponsored by Revlon, and when I say sponsored by Revlon, I mean like, Revlon has their name all over it. Yeah, Revlon's 6400, yeah, but... Yes, Revlon presents. Yeah.

Exactly that. And there will be like a segment in the middle like, Revlon presents Future Emma makeup, the futuristic makeup for your face. Notice how this white woman looks homely, but this white woman has slap on her face. Like it's very like, you know. I love this, this is a new voice for you. It's great. They just come out, they really do. There's no rhyme or reason. The format of this show is basically that the contestants can come back week after week, and they get asked a series of very difficult questions very fast

by the host in their specialist subject in particular so they'll come in and they'll be like I'm a horse racing expert, I'm a cigar expert, I'm a knitting expert whatever it is and they'll get like drilled on their questions and the better they do at these questions the more money they get incrementally a thousand, two thousand, four, six, all the way up to 64,000. Okay. Once they reach a branch, let's say they reach 16,000 or whatever it is, they are given the opportunity to leave, think about it for a week, talk about it with their partner, come back and decide whether they will pursue

the next level or take what they have and leave. If you keep going and you fuck it up, you lose. It seems wild that you get the week to kind of like mull it over. It's interesting because it has an interesting function in that it creates characters on the show in a way that like a week to week game show that does not have the same contestants. You don't have these these arcs of like rooting for a particular contestant or rooting against a particular contestant week over week. And it also like, it escalates the pressure, right? You might not tune in to watch someone do the 2000 week, but you'll tune in if someone makes it to the $64,000

question. Because this is in 1950, that's an enormous sum. I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, it's like who wants to be a millionaire kind of vibes. Yeah. We'll get to that a millionaire kind of vibes. Yeah. We'll get to that. I bet we will. They're very showy on $64,000 question about how secure everything is. They'll be like, they start with like an IBM sorting machine that takes up the whole stage, picks it randomly, and then it goes to like this banker with this locked certified envelope

from a safe, you know, they make a big show about how nobody could game this. There's no way anybody could cheat, which is of course hilarious. It's entirely pageantry and the shows by the end will be like rigged from start to finish. One day, because the word of the sponsor is so important, Charles Revson, who runs Revlon, calls these people with notes all the time. You know, what he thinks would make the ratings go up, da, da, da, da. And one day he calls up and he says, and

this is the way that he expresses it and the producer who receives this call remembers it this way. Charles Revson says that quote, he thinks the Lincoln expert is boring. He wants you to stiff him. So like this guy is boring. I don't want him on the show. Yeah. Make like, screw him out of it. Get the hook. I don't want him on the show. Yeah, like screw him out of it. Get the hook. Yeah. Yeah, give him the hook and sponsors start chipping in that

way. I don't like that one. I like her. I don't like him. Whatever. Reality TV and its empathy. But the problem is if we're running like a legitimate competition, you can't game who's going to win a legitimate competition, right? Right, yeah. It would have been much better for my arc if you didn't just whip those boys' asses, but you did. So... Good to see. Can't help. Greatness.

Um, so the way that they take steps to hold onto popular contestants and get rid of others is they'll deliberately ask them questions that they know that they can answer because to get on to the show You need to take some sort of test in whatever it is, right? And so if you ask someone in that context You know if they know who wrote Lolita and they do you can ask that on the show and they'll answer it Yeah, yeah, okay. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. And on the other hand, you can kind of be a little bit sneaky about what you ask others in order to get them kicked off the show. For example, have you ever heard of Dr. Joyce Brothers? No. She became a thing because she was a contestant on the $64,000 question who came back week over

week. That's where she got her start and she would later go on to be sort of a cultural pop psychiatrist if you like Yeah influencer Yeah, they didn't have that word then. Yeah, but yeah, so she's on the 64,000 dollar question as this psychiatrist She had tried to get on before and the guy who was telling the stories like I don't remember what her subject was But we told her that we like contrast so like if you were like this like pretty young woman's psychiatrist But you also knew about, I don't know. And then they list off a bunch of like manly subjects including boxing and Joyce is like,

okay, comes back. She has reinvented herself as a boxing expert through extensive study. Wow. She did not give a shit about, yeah, cramped. She crammed on boxing. Yeah. And became so good that she got on their show as their boxing expert. Well after a few weeks of Dr. Joyce Brothers, somebody at Revlon decides she's not

the right woman for this for whatever reason. Like implicitly, she's not pretty enough, which is crazy. Or maybe she's too smart, she's like a mouse, he's like, I don't know what the thought was. But they want to give her the hook. Or we're just seeing too much of her get her out. Sure, or the ratings or whatever. So what they decide to do to give her the hook is they decide to ask her about

referees rather than boxers. And they're like, oh, she won't know this. But she does. She gets all the questions right, ends up doing well for herself, launches her career as a psychiatrist. Right, so she's like gaming the crooked system kind of thing. Yeah, launches her career as a psychiatrist in the public eye, I should say, she was already a psychiatrist.

Yeah. That wasn't, I guess, that uncommon that a winner of a show like this would become a household name. You get these overnight celebs, endorsements, an 11-year-old stockbroker, baseball expert becomes a commentator, guy with a great eight education, wins more than anyone else. They become these microcelebrities who are able to attain niche relevance, and sometimes more than

niche relevance as we'll discuss with one particular guy Charles Van Doran through their game show winnings. And because we've got this ecosystem of new stars, we now have nothing to do with them, but we've taken the time to build audience awareness in relation to all of these people. Dr. Joyce Brothers, this baseball expert, you know, whoever it is. They enter your home, which was kind of a foreign concept at that time, yeah. This guy Charles Van Doren, who I mentioned, he's a 21 competitor and I'll talk about him a little bit later, but there was very much a like, he enters our homes for our weekly

visit and we love to see him and isn't he so great? Yeah. There's very that. They come up with a new format for these new stars called the $64,000 Challenge. And this is sort of, we pit one of our big names in an isolation booth against someone else in another isolation booth.

And they're answering like, at each other, and they can't hear each other. And so this becomes a huge hit. Revlon now has the two top rated shows on TV. They're doing like crazy amounts of advertising money. Yeah. And we've got this new format to propagate these relationships that we have with these

new stars, but also this new way of rigging things. Yeah, nudging and putting fences where we don't want people to go. It starts to turn into a slightly harder nudge. There's a contestant on the $64,000 challenge called Reverend Stoney Jackson, and he talks about being given answers in advance without knowing about it and without his consent. His category was world's greatest lovers, wins $4,000 on the challenge, but the last, the answer to the last question that he answers, according to him, is something about the poet Thomas Hood. He's in the green room before the show and they see him like reading I guess some book of poetry or something to study up and the producer goes, that's interesting.

Do you know who wrote a poem similar to that? Oh. Sony Jackson's like, no, no, no, but I gotta go. I'm off to the show. Yeah, they're calling my name. Yeah. The producer yells out after him, it was Thomas Hood! Thomas Hood, H-O-O-D.

And of course that's the answer to the question that wins him $4,000. Oh my goodness. He then says, this was a scam from start to finish, refuses to take the check and contacts Time Magazine in the New York Times, but he is taken as just like disgruntled and there's not, he doesn't have confirmation, he doesn't have like material proof, which I think that like the standard of journalism back then especially was like, you can't go to press without like hard proof. But this is also making me think like, there's certain laws and protections about contest winning and stuff like this and like I wonder if this was still nascent.

Because of this. It's because of this, okay. Because of this. Because of this. Yeah, so basically what happens next is more shows like this start coming out, and particularly a show called 21 comes out in 1956. Okay. Sponsored by Geritol.

It's, Geritol is the Revlon of this. Geritol everywhere. Geritol this, Geritol that. Geritol, Geritol, Geritol, Geritol, Geritol. Yeah. By the time 21 comes out, the contestants are basically complete partners in the deception from beginning to end. Okay, yeah. They're Dylan and Jonathan.

Okay. They're Dylan and Jonathan. Well, no, they're not Dylan and Jonathan. Dylan and Jonathan are a level below these guys because Dylan and Jonathan played the competition. Other than the final question, they played the competition entirely straight. That's true. Yeah, yeah. What happens here with 21 is the first show isn't rigged.

They don't intend to rig it, but it's dull as hell. The contestants are dumb. It's zero zero drag out tie. And the sponsors call Daniel Enright the producer. And they say, I never want to see that again. That was terrible. Basically, the rules of 21 I find a bit complicated and I won't try to explain them except to say, this is a person versus person quiz off into isolation booths. That's all you kind of need to know.

Okay, okay. And from there, from this, from that call from the sponsors, they, they rig it from there. They try to seek out people who they think will resonate with the audience positively. We really want this person to succeed. Yeah negatively. We really want this person to lose. Test group it. Yeah. They bring them in and coach them in every aspect of their presentation. They say for someone that they want to win like this guy Herb Stemple. Herb Stemple is like a big name who they had win week to week to week. The Herbstemple is like a big name who they had win week to week to week. The producer, Daniel Enright, saw him as someone who might annoy the audience and that's a

reaction, right? You want to see this guy lose. And so they invite Herbstemple in and they lean back in the sofa and they say, how would you like to make $25,000? Herbstemple says, oh, who wouldn't? Well, play ball and we'll make sure you do. They tell him, go get like a marine type haircut, take these horn rimmed glasses.

They dress him up like a nerd in an ill fitting suit, paint him as this like broke GI, just trying to work his way through school. They said, never call the host Jack. Always call him Mr. Barry. Be very humble, look very sheepish. They invite him on and his first episode, he wins $9,000. He's never had that much money before at Great Day's Work.

Oh yeah. I love that note about never calling the host Jack, say Mr. Berry. Like that does a lot. Yeah. They have every aspect of this guy's presentation down. He says the hardest part wasn't remembering the answers that they fed him. The hardest part was remembering the various stage directions. Oh. He would show up at N-Rates office before the show every week and the questions and answers would be prepared and they say here's what you need to do you need to pause, you need to mop your brow, bite your lip, look look into camera to bite your lip like they have him down to throw your brow. Yeah, they have him choreographed

beat by beat by beat by beat. Like here's, then you need to look up with a dazzling smile and give your answer and explore with joy when you get it right, et cetera. Weird. Herb Stemple is there for six weeks. He's crushing it. He becomes again a national celebrity

because he's in people's homes every week for six weeks, it's big cachet. Right. There's an cachet. Right. There's an aspect of wish fulfillment. You can turn on TV to like imagine that that could be you and then that you're like we all have this fantasy that like under the gun we're like gonna be really really good at our chosen subject of boxing and just everyone's gonna notice and we're gonna be sick and it's gonna launch my career as Dr. Joyce Brothers, whatever. But then the ratings begin to

dip and we get the call from Revlon that Herb's temple, give him a hook. Oh shit, Herb! Herb doesn't wanna do that. Herb's not down with taking a dive. He's put in all this work. He's put in all this work and he's like, well, can you just like maybe just let me run it honestly

then just don't give him the answers, but don't give me the answers. And let's see if they're like, no, you said when the time came that you would take a dive the time has come for you. Does that come with a bonus? Cuz that seems like the only way to do it is like when you take the dive we will give you 10 grand you know or something like that. No and I think they tried to like I maybe short change him on some of them. Well you were not actually obviously gonna give you everything like the

network and the production team seems to have been like very Schemey and how they went about this yeah, obviously not particularly Kind to anybody that they dealt with and I bet because the whole process was so new everyone was pretty naive about it I was like, okay. Well, if you'll give me the okay. Yeah. Oh, okay. I also think like we're very ethically naive at this time We are just cruel to one another to be kind, right? The challenger who emerges against Herb Stemple is sort of his complete opposite. He's Charles Van Doran. Oh, Van. Van Doran. He's a handsome, likable, Columbia University professor. He's funny. He has an MA in astrophysics

and a PhD in English. Fuck him. His father was Pulitzer Prize- winning poet Mark Van Doran. I believe his uncle also has a Pulitzer Prize. His mother was novelist Dorothy Van Doran. Oh, wow. He's very New England in his presentation and, you know... Tweed and elbow patches on the blazer. He's Ray Fiennes in the movie.

Gotcha. Quiz show is the movie and we'll talk about that. It's a Robert Redford movie that comes out in 1994 about all this. Robert Redford being the director. Yeah. When they at first of course tell this beautiful movie star handsome as the shows go on and the rigging continues, the people get prettier and prettier by the way. All these geniuses get more and more beautiful.

But he's Van Doren who's kind of this really handsome intellectual. He doesn't want to do it, like rig it, but they tell him that, you know, education is really going down the tubes in America and there's this strain of anti-intellectualism that's really pervasive. If we could give the people an idol to look up to who embodied all the great things about being intelligent, wise. Hosting boy, kind of wise. Yeah, and so that's how they kind of flatter his ego,

I guess. And so that's what he ends up nibbling on. Yeah, but it's also like you'll be recognized in the angles of history and time and not. And also you get a bunch of money. Yeah, and money. And if you want to be famous, you can be famous. Yeah.

Right? And so Van Doren and Stemple have a series of ties. They've set up the stakes here beautifully. The way the game is set up, the more ties these two have, the more money is at risk. Oh, OK, OK, OK. So a tie doesn't just null out the episode. It like upsets me. No, we go, I guess you'll have to come back next week

and see what happens right because we're writing this like it's a soap opera. Right. We're writing it for the highs and lows. Yeah. We can do that we just rig the game show top to bottom. But a bing but a boom. The raiding skyrocket. Finally we get to the day when Herb has to throw it and the real way that the end of the game goes down is is a little bit more complicated and so it's been a bit simplified in the historical memory. But the way that it's remembered is that the question that Herb most conspicuously biffs is which movie won best picture at the 1955 Academy Awards? Now this question is being asked in 1957. Yeah. And the movie in question actually happens to be one of Herb's favorite movies because it's about like a kind of

Shlubby dude from New York kind of just like him and he says quote I knew that the answer was Marty the Ernest Borgneid film Marty Okay, but Dan and Wright specifically wanted me to miss that question This hurt me very deeply because this was one of my favorite pictures of all time and I can never forget this a Few seconds before that as I was trying to come up with the answer, I could have changed my mind. I could have said the answer is Marty instead of on the waterfront, which is what he ends up saying.

I would have won. There would have been no Charles Van Doren, no famous celebrity. Charles Van Doren would have gone back to teaching college and my whole life would have been changed. On the day I was due to lose to Van Doren, I sat home watching television in the morning. Every few minutes an announcement would break in on WNBC saying is Herb Stemple gonna win over $100,000 tonight and I said no he's not gonna win $100,000 He's gonna take a dive

A Marty dive A Marty style dive. Oh right into the water A beautiful swan dive and he loses Charles Van Doren becomes the shit. He gets the cover of Time magazine, which none of his famous relatives have ever had. He gets a $500,000 a year job as one of the hosts of the Today Show. Oh, whoa. What? So he seriously reaches stratospheric heights because of this, and Herb Stemple, who's watching,

is pissed that he's in this guy's shadow now. I would be too, all for what? All because someone was like, eh, take the dive. Take the dive, and like, for maximum drama, we want you to miss an easy question so everyone at home will be scratching their heads. So we're giving you like, you have to fuck, you have to pretend you don't know your favorite movie. Oh, that's just like like such a knife to the heart too. That would be terrible. Like imagine if I if it was something that I had like learned on the podcast they were like

Taylor you have to pretend you don't know who the ogres is. I would be like the ogres is deep in you dude. Jean Webert you've you've carried her for a long time. Get her out. John Wabare, you've carried her for a long time. Get her out, get her out. Okay. So, like Stony Jackson, Herb, who's really angry, goes to the media, says Dan Enright, the producer, we never counted on a contestant being so traumatized it would overcome their own sense of self-preservation. Oh, damn.

That is, yeah. So, Herb is really fucked up by all this, but like Stony Jackson, we can't go to press with this. We don't have enough proof. Right. Then the Dotto scandal breaks. So forgotten TV show called Dotto, but when it aired, it was the highest rated daytime TV show in the history of TV.

Holy. For the handful episodes it got. It had two million people sending in postcards applying to be on it, and they had a standby standby contestant and he's my husband from the past. He's incredibly hot and his name was Edward Hilgemeier Jr. Tall. I like that phrase, husband from the past. Big, beautiful smile. He's my husband. Edward, I know that you've passed away because I found you're a rituary but like call me. You, the next time I got the Ouija board out. But he has like a footnote in being the one to kind of break open for the first time with

evidence one of these game show things. Oh my goodness. Also another reason to be your husband from the past. Whistleblowers love it. Love to see it. I hope that he didn't get like taken out by Big Dotto. That would be sad. Oh fuck. Kind of what happens is Edward Hilgmeier is a standby contestant and he sees a very attractive young woman taking notes and looking kind of nervous backstage.

She goes out and answers the Dotto questions as you do and Hilgmeier kind of is just not buying it. She's like answering too quickly, too smoothly. The act of thinking isn't really convincing him. So he notices that she left her notebook behind, he picks it up, of course it has all of the answers in it. And he takes that to the media and now that we have evidence to break the story open, everybody's up for grabs. Hard evidence too. Including $64,000 question and $64,000 challenge, which is what Stoney Jackson was talking about,

including 21, which is what Herb and everybody's on the chop. The $64,000 challenge, which is what Stoney Jackson was talking about, including 21, which is what Herb and everybody's on the chop The $64,000 question previously top rated drops to 73rd place The DA launches a probe. Ooh probes. Wow. We're getting legal now Herb Stemple calls the New York ADA Joseph Stone and spills his guts basically and right the producer starts a campaign to discredit Stemple including a secret audio recording to paint him as mentally unstable. Oh! Freaking shit. Okay. Yeah. And they convene in the end the New York DA convenes a grand jury. They hear 150 witnesses including a hundred contestants that lied under oath at the

whim of the producers. And now mind you, at this point, I believe we haven't cleanly decided, as we will, that this sort of thing constitutes fraud. So they're not doing anything illegal until they perjure themselves here, but they do perjure themselves here. That they do perjure. Yeah. The grand jury testimony gets sealed from the public by Judge Mitchell Schweitzer, one of the distant Mitchells in our family tree. Yeah. It's unprecedented. The intentions are unclear and Congress becomes worried about a cover-up. So a guy named Richard Goodwin in particular, who's played by Rob Moro in the movie quiz show,

who's one of the main characters. I haven't seen that movie. I should watch it. I watched it for this. It's good. It's good. It's a bit long for what it is I think but it's good and it's critically well received as well. Richard Goodwin and the other congress folks call this big grand jury and particularly one of the speakers at this at this thing is a child actor named Patty Duke. The name might be familiar. She's a famous name of that era. Yeah, yeah. She was on one of these shows when she was 12, where the gimmick was we pair up like child celebrities with, I think probably normies and they answer trivia

together. And they of course had coached the whole thing. Yeah. And so she, she takes the stand at 15 and she just lies. She lies her face off until she's ready to step down. Then one of the senators looks at her and says, no, Patty, is everything you told us here the truth? And she breaks down crying and they put her back on the stand and she tells the whole truth. She airs everybody out. Whoa.

Good for her. And then it's cruel to use children that way. I agree. I'm good for Jamie Snodgrass, one of the lesser known winners of 21, who when he was going through this whole thing, he was like, you know, I should probably document this in some way. Smart.

Just to be sure. Smart Jamie. To quote Jamie himself, I didn't think it was very wrong but something told me I had better cover my ass with it. Yeah. What he ends up doing is he will be given the answers in advance because it's 21 they give you the answers in advance and he'll type them up and he mails them in a series of postmarked letters to himself which he then has unopened. So he can be like hey I've got this postmarked letter unopened from myself from like two days before the show with the answers that I

was supposed to have. That's pretty good. That is pretty good. So that ends up being another one of the major pieces of evidence against this game show rigging thing. Yeah. But it's still deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny. Everybody except for Herb Stemple who's going hard saying Van Doran is in on this. And people specifically don't want to believe that Charles Van Doran is in on this. The host of today's show, they love him. Yeah, you gotta trust your intellectual heroes. Beloved hot guy, right?

Yeah. And finally, Charles Van Doran goes to Congress and he testifies for the first time to anyone I believe family included that he's been living in fear for three years. He spills his guts in a speech that gets like some nice kudos from some of the congressmen but then one of the other congressmen says, uh, I don't think someone as intelligent as you should be applauded for finally being honest. And then people in the courtroom apparently, some scattered applause at this. Yeah, ooh, ooh, ooh, nice, yeah. In the end, one producer and 18 contestants, including Van Doren, were arrested and convicted of lying under oath to the grand jury.

They pleaded guilty, got suspended sentences in no jail time. The various quiz producers involved got blacklisted and forced out of TV, although I know Nright came back and made money on game shows, so apparently temporary blacklisting. The networks took control over the sponsors, so like sponsors can't call in and say knock off the Lincoln expert anymore. Those federal regulations that you were talking about were enacted against what is called broadcast fraud. There we go. Okay, okay. Van Doran is let go from the Today Show and Columbia University. He ends up working as

like fact checker at Encyclopedia Britannica, so don't feel bad for him. Okay. But that does seem odd that he's now this very well-known perjurer liar and he's a fact checker. Yeah, that's kind of fun. Now that you mention it, yeah. So, Perp's temple unfortunately passed away in 2020, Van Doran in 2021. Oh, RIP.

Stemple went back to in 2020, Vandoren in 2021. Oh, RIPs. Stemple went back to being like a private citizen as well. Yeah. Years later in the WGBH documentary, American Experienced the Quiz Show Scandal, which was my source here, Dan Enright stated about Herb Stemple. This man was taken from obscurity and then exposed to light of celebrity, became for some six weeks a celebrity and then just as quickly was cast back into obscurity. And we at the time deluded ourselves into believing that what we were doing was not that wrong and I bear a tremendous guilt to Herbstemple and I was sorry I should have been far more mindful and far more

sensitive. In 2004, Herbstemple responded to the question, do you believe that? No. I believe he feels bad that I exposed his show. That's my real belief. Yeah, and he's saving face by by acknowledging a personal responsibility and a personal effect. Like, he went to therapy about it would be my guess. Yeah, yeah. That's the first of our cluster of stories today. That's a little recap of the Quiz Show rigging scandals of the 1950s. The early days.

But it's time to step into what I would say is a realm of what I would consider not really cheating. I don't think the people in the next two stories that I'm going to tell you actually cheated. I think that they just maybe broke some systems that were not intended to be broken. That makes it sound way cooler. Well, we got some system breakers coming. Josie, have you ever heard of the game show Press Your Luck? No. Repress? Press. P- ever heard of the game show Press Your Luck? No.

Repress? Press. P-R-E-S-S Your Luck. OK. Repress feels oppressive. Repress your emotions. Press your luck. Press your luck.

OK. That's a better title. This was a game show hosted by Peter Tamarkin. The original ran on CBS Daytime from 1983 to 1986. It was sort of regarded as a very technological marvel of its time because of the way that it works is it's comprised of a trivia round that dictates how many spins you'll get on the whammy board.

Whammy board. Or the big board it's called. Okay. You hit a button when you go, you said that you go big bucks, big bucks, no whammies, we don't want any whammies. Stop and you hit the buzzer and on the screen there's a big frame around your face with all of these like 4,000. A trip to Hawaii.

Okay. 3,000 in a spin. Whammy! And if you hit a Whammy you lose everything you've earned. This little red goblin comes on the screen. They have a little like bowling alley animation for him where he comes and takes all your money and piles it in his limo and runs off.

And so that's part of the fun of the show is watching and seeing the little whammy guys. They're very cute. Mm-hmm. No whammies. Big bucks, no whammies. And it was on press re-luck that an Ohio air conditioning mechanic named Michael Larson won the highest total prize winnings to that point in game show history. Whoa! Over $100,000. He is described by his brother James as strange, and his former partner Teresa as thinking

that he was smarter than everyone else and always looking for a quick buck. Okay. Good for a game show, I guess. He's obsessed with cracking TV game shows. By the time he starts in on his Press Your Luck quest, his relationship with Theresa's really strained. He's not really like spending time with his kid. He'll end up going on to have like three kids by three mothers, none of whom he's on great terms with. So he's just like really, really into his get rich quick shit. In particular,

he's like really hyper fixated on TV game shows. He's stacked these three TVs in like a little pyramid. He's watching them at once kind of thing like really accessing trance day. Yeah not the most attentive partner probably or father. Also like having multiple screens now is kind of intense and watching different stuff but it's like a doable thing. I guess no I do that now. I do that now yeah but in the 80s you have to like set those those were three like you had to drag those bad boys in from the street Yeah, and they're expensive too like that's not those cathode ray tube situations. This are heavy Scoot come TV's it's a very different vibe to do it in the 80s versus now. Yeah, and

So he's watching press your lock. He's watching press your lock and he's... He's not watching it, he's like consuming it, he's swimming in it. Oh, he's absorbing it through his skin and his eyes, yes. And he's watching particularly the patterns that the... Boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop. Stop! He's watching particularly the patterns of these and apparently as Teresa, the former partner, describes it. She's like, he just starts like, like I got it.

He just starts laughing. I've got it. He's like over the moon. He's cracked the code. And he has cracked how the game board works. And specifically, there are two different game boards responsible for the randomization. It's a very high-tech thing. And they're randomizing five lists of 18

random patterns, which is a lot, but it's not so crazy that you couldn't figure it out if you were, if you had three TVs running at the same time and you were just gooning on Press Your Luck, right? Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, slimy, slimy skin absorption, yeah. Right, and so typically the average competitor has a one in six odds of hitting a whammy based on the way that he's calculated the odds. No whammy's. No whammy's. What he's realized is that there are two squares in all of the patterns that never will have a whammy on them. So if you imagine that there's like 20 something like 20 squares total 5555 I don't know if those are the right numbers. 20 squares total, five, five, five, five, I don't know if those are the right numbers, but something like numbers four and 12, if you number them going around in clockwise,

something like four and 12 will never have a whammy on them. So as long as you can time your thing to land there, you should hypothetically be able to go forever, right? No whammies. No whammies. He realizes that all he needs to do is ignore the prizes and focus on where the lights land. Specifically, those squares will often have like 2,000 and a spin, which adds to the amount of times that you can spin. Mm-hmm, yeah.

Michael Larson, he goes to auditions in LA, these sessions about 50 people, and he really plays up. I'm here to get my six-year-old daughter a present, and I got this shirt from the thrift store for 50 cents. I'm an ice cream man back home in the summers, but you know, I'm short on cash. Like really laying in this kind of like poor little hazy shtick. Yeah, yeah. Right. But the vibe doesn't quite work and you'll hear throughout that people kind of don't like this guy and don't really trust his vibe. One of the casting people Bobby Edwards says, I can tell he's like not an ice cream guy. I can't quite tell, but I don't buy it.

He was against casting Michael Larson, but the producers wanted to book him, so they book him. Okay. May 19th, 1984, television city in Hollywood. Michael takes the stage against his two opposing contestants, Ed Long and Janie Lytris, or Lytris, L-I-T-R-A-S. Okay. Dacan or Dakin, D-A-K-A-N. I'm just calling her Janie. Love you Janes.

They're both there. They're casual players. They think that this is just gonna be fun. Their normies like you and me, they're not doing the like let me crack the algorithm shit. They're going like, ah stop! Yeah! You know. Yeah. And Janie in particular notes that she kind of found him creepy in the green room but that she thought quote I knew that I could beat this creepy person Good good for her. Yeah. Well is it it's not about to be Spoiler alert she does not beat this creepy person the host Peter to mark in welcomes everybody Michael Larson on his very first spin he gets a whammy and he kind of chastises himself I watched four documentaries for the four main stories that I'm doing.

This one was from the Game Show Network and it actually had Peter Tamarkin on it narrating it and it had, they brought back Ed and Janie to show them how Michael did it and to see if they could do it too. And like Ed actually tries it out once he knows the code and he can do it for, he can just run for like an hour kind of thing. So they show, they kind of also do like a real like body language analysis of him as he's like kind of accessing trans state and like how you can tell when he fucks up because like he gets a whammy right away whatever and then there will be another time where like he'll hit it and he'll

get like a trip to Bermuda but because it's not in the square that he wanted it means he fucked up and he could have gotten a whammy so you'll see him like wince even though he should be happy that he got a trip to Bermuda. Oh right, yeah. He's so hyper focused on the pattern that like everything else is kind of falling away, yeah. Yeah. And specifically he gets into a real pattern of like when he's tranced out, he'll hit it and then he'll say woo before a contestant who hadn't recognized the pattern should even know that they got it right. Like he'll say woo before he sees the prize, but he knows that, oh if I hit it on number

four the whammy will never be there. Woo! So he's like hit, woo! And then he'll kind of register what the actual prize is. And then it's like oh there's no whammy there. Great. Oh cool. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. His normal person doing this by the seat of his pants act is kind of falling apart. Pretty thin, yeah. However, as I discussed off the top, do you think this constitutes cheating in your opinion? Because he's just spotted a pattern that no one else has. Yeah. It's a flaw in the system that he's exploiting for sure, and that the producers who are now biting their nails and going limp in silence, they're like, is this guy cheating?

What is, is someone like rigging this backstage? What is happening? They're pissed off, obvious or like not pissed off, but like be mused certainly. But do you think it's actually cheating in your opinion, knowing what's going on? That's a tricky one because he's like gaming the system, which is like rad. Let's go fuck the man. But it's also like compared to the other contestants he is

cheating because the intention of the game is to have this still be a randomized aspect like that the the hitting the buzzer. That's the spirit of the game but it's not the letter in the game there's nothing in the rules that says that you can't do this. Yeah but I guess that's the question like if you're not following the spirit of the game is that cheating and I guess that's the question, like if you're not following the spirit of the game, is that cheating? And I guess technically it's not. And I think like if you're like in the living room playing games with you know friends and family, it's like well just follow the fucking spirit of the game. You know, like don't, why are we doing this?

But if there's like a hundred plus grand on the line potentially. The whole situation changes I think. It becomes much more elevated and like the cracks. Yeah, yeah, no I think, yeah, you're right, he's in this scenario I don't think he's cheating. If he were at home playing with like his nieces and nephews I'd be like calm down sir because you know it's just like this is a little. They're crying, they're crying. Yeah, yeah, and you don't care about like all the other things, you just want to hit this button at the right time. That's a shit-ass game.

Stop. Yeah. But considering the money on the line... Ah, Cookie Clicker makes a lot of money. I do like Bop It. That's hitting a button at the time. There you go. Pass it.

But he's not passing it. He's keeping the ball rolling. He's not passing it. It's true. He's pulling it. He's twisting it. He's not passing it, it's true. He's pulling it, he's twisting it, he's not passing it. His competitor, Janie, quote, I just kept clapping and getting madder and madder.

So, cause she's like, oh, this was supposed to be me, man. Yeah, yeah. She's watching, and then she does play and she plays like a normie. She's not using his advanced two hand technique. She doesn't know the algorithm. She isn't accessing trance state. She's just playing it like you'd play a slot machine. He's playing it like you'd play a symphony, right? They're doing totally different things.

Yeah, yeah. They're playing different games. At that point, they're playing different games. They're playing different games. And so by the end, Michael Larson has won $110,237 which is in today's money $323,286.18. By the end of it, he's getting tired. You can see he's starting to like land on spots that he's not intending anymore. Cause he's just like, he's just, it's been a pretty intense. We've had to carry it over into a second show.

Yeah, he hasn't blinked in 42 minutes. It's, yeah, it's a lot, yeah. In the end, he goes 45 spins in a row without a whammy after that first one that he got you hate this guy You hate this guy. Yeah, I hate this guy. Absolutely, and he has a weird vibe And he has like a creepy slick skinned vibe. Yeah, no one likes it after Michael wins It's apparently just silence and Peter Tamarkin breaks the silence. I don't believe this just happened Janie says Everyone's surrounded Michael and I just slithered off like a big loser. And said, thank god it's over.

Yeah, that's how I would feel. I was like, oh god, can I go home now? Guys, it's just like this episode isn't even about me. I'm supporting Cas. Can I go? Can I go to the bathroom? What is this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just a piece of furniture over here. Yeah, I'm a prop for Michael Larson's big ice tier. Just let me fucking slither off. I like that verbiage. Slither off poor Janie, poor Ed. The postmortem the next day, apparently every department in CBS gets together and they're all pointing fingers at each other. Whose fault is this? How could we let this happen? Do we have to pay this guy his money? The network's trying to get out of paying the money. I'm sure. The producers watch back

this footage, they go over the release with a fine-tooth comb, and when they figure out kind of what's happened, it is ultimately decided that he played fairly and is an eligible contestant, and the producers insist that he be paid the money against CBS's wishes. The episode is broadcast against CBS's wishes because they episode is broadcast against CBS's wishes. I'm sure it was a team of lawyers who said like, there's no way that we can't pay him. Yeah, he didn't break the rules. And so it ends up getting broadcast split into two episodes. The networks are always sheepish about this, but they always end up being like, I'm sure that got great ratings. This guy just fucking mowing these motherfucker so much

that I'm here sat- I'm sat here like 40-some years later talking to you about it, right? True, true, true. It's not the longevity that they maybe want for the ratings, but a good old spike is a good old spike. Hey baby, hey baby. They obviously the production team makes immediate changes to the patterns and all the lists on the big board. We now have 32 lists of 18. At the time that this is released, it's the early 2000s and they were doing the version that I remember watching and growing up with on Game Show Network, which was Whammy the new Press Your Lock. That one was described by this documentary as a truly random, completely Larson-proof

setup. Larson-proof. Cute. Like that. Larson gets home from his big win with a big ego because this guy who evidently thought he was smarter than everybody that has now been confirmed. It spurs him into other get rich quick ideas. Specifically there was this contest where if you could match the serial number to a $1 bill you would get $30,000

is like a radio contest. So they would give out a serial number and if you had that $1 bill you'd get this money. He took apparently out all of the money or a huge chunk of the money from Press Your Luck in $1 bills and made his like poor fucking family just zone it with him right which they hated. They despised him for this and they end up leaving because what happens is they go to a Christmas party and- Oh my god, it's Christmas and he's making them like bleary eyed, read serial numbers on $1 bills? Well, not for long because word gets around that you have fucking $100,000 in cash in your house, somebody breaks in, steals the money. All in once.

All in once. All in once. And then you can go and, you don't even need to, you don't even need to launder that. He already laundered it for you. Yeah, yeah. And if you want to enter this radio contest now, do you? Yeah, Bada Bing, Bada Boom. Whoa.

So this really estranges him from his family, and he kind of retreats into like a series of get rich, quick schemes that get him in trouble with the law telephone scams federal government trying to hunt him down Came in islands. There's a little he briefly appears He has a little pot back up in relevance in 1994 when quiz show comes up and we're retracing all of the game show scandals So he does like a little bit of interview for that. Yeah during what she says I'd like to play Jeopardy I think I figured out some angles on that. And this is where the documentary gets really weird because

Peter Tamarkin goes, his voice sounds a little different, right? That's throat cancer. The Ultimate Whammy came for Michael Larson on February 16th, 1999. The Ultimate Whammy. The Ultimate Whammy. There's throat cancer is the Ultimate whammy. The ultimate whammy. Dazz, throat cancer is the ultimate whammy. No way to break the code on the whammy of death. What a completely demented line of narration in this thing. But he says it with great aplomb. I'm going to say it on my deathbed.

I'm excited. The ultimate whammy. On Larson's deathbed, he tried to get in touch with his kids in no dice so he burned a lot of bridges. And they end this documentary about the whammy scandal with a toast and someone says to Michael Larson who's up there and if there's a god up there all I can say is watch your pockets. And then someone responds he may not be up above and that's the note that we end this entire talk, she mentioned. Oh my goodness. Just roasting this poor motherfucker. Oh yeah, he did not make friends in his lifetime. That is, that is clear. Damn.

So a similar thing to this whammy press your luck thing occurred in 2008 in season 38 of The Price is Right, which is right around the time that Drew Carey took over. Do you remember the perfect bid? There was a perfect bid on Price's Right and Drew Carey specifically got a lot of shit because he really no sold it. He was really like, yep, you did. It's a perfect bid.

He had both showcases and everyone kind of really gave Drew Carey shit for his limp reaction and apparently his limp reaction is because the producer suspected that this guy Terry Nice who gave the perfect bid had cheated. He insists that this was his own knowledge and particularly the last three digits of his special, his lucky guess. He's like oh I those are like my wife's birthday and da-da-da 23, 740, he comes up with this kind of cockamamie reason for that specific number. And that's kind of the accepted thing for a while until in 2017, a documentary comes out called Perfect Bid, The Contestant Who Knew Too Much. And it's about how what really happened was there was another guy named Theodore Slosson, Ted Slosson, who from a very young

age had taken an obsession with the prices, right? I've seen this documentary, yeah. Right, okay, so you know this. So he takes to noticing patterns in the prizes, like, oh, I saw that same fridge price four times. He sets up like an MS-DOS game with all the prices in it. Yeah. And he makes a real, like, hobby and community out of coming to these shows and basically, like, instructing people on the right answers from the audience. Yeah, yeah.

And it's not, like, from what I remember that documentary too. It's not that he's trying to game the system. It's that he just, like, loves the game so much. At first, he was just trying really hard to get in contestants row and he eventually like he eventually makes it but loses on the wheel because the way that the price is right works is you start as a member of the audience, you come down to contestant row where you're able to gas and the audience is able the whole time to yell out stuff at you which Ted does. And then from contestant row you play a random pricing game, then you spin a big wheel and

if you get the right numbers on the big wheel, you go to the showcase. In the final round there are two showcases with lots of prizes and you have to correctly guess the total value of one of the showcases. And if you guess the showcase, within 500 you get both showcases, you versus another person it's head to head, and of course it's incredibly rare that someone would get it spot on perfect. Ted, he loses at the wheel and at the time the rules state that after that you kind of can't come back and be in contestant row. So he starts to go back less frequently but then they with the new production team they relax the rules they say if it was outside of 10 years ago you can come back so Ted starts going back He ends up in the audience next to the wife of this guy, Terry Nees.

And he tells her the answer. She communicates it to Terry. Yeah. Kind of takes the credit for a while. Yeah. Until this documentary came out. That's right. But I think it's interesting because again,

Drew Carey ends up being in my estimation a little bit of a poor sport about the whole thing and describing it on podcasts. He like, I think compares. I forget if it's Ted or Terry. I forget how known it is at this point, but he compares him to Rain Man, which I think is really rude because this is like, don't call the people who are like devoted fans of your show. They make a big deal on this thing about how Bob Barker would always say, you're a loyal friend and true. And even if they were like complaining

and criticizing, that meant that they were loyal friends and true because they loved the show enough to blah blah blah to sit here and bitch about how they changed the shade of yellow on the name tags, right? Right, yeah, yeah. And so I thought that Drew Carey kind of comes out and like gives us some pretty rude podcast interviews about how the producers all thought it was cheating because like because of this shake up with Bob Barker leaving, they refreshed the production team. This one guy, Roger Dobb, Coets who a lot of people were really loyal to gets fired. And they thought that someone in retaliation,

like someone on the production side of things had leaked the right answer to get revenge on Roger's behalf or something. But I think you're right. The hero out of all of it is Bob Barker because he's like just sweet old man who's just like. Yeah. once your pets to get speed or neuter and uh and and I thought I think Ted comes off fine in it because again

true I don't consider that this is an example of cheating yeah I consider this as an example of a broken system and someone who is very good at pattern spotting yeah a different situation from Mike Larson because there is just this sense of like he just loves the game so much he loves Bob Barker. He wants to be there. He loves standing in line in front of the studio. Deeply intensely interested in the prices, right? It's a happy place. Yeah, yeah.

And who can say no, who among us? Who can say no to that? Amen. The last of the game show scandals that I'll be getting into. Have you ever heard anything about the 2001 incident on who wants to be a millionaire? The UK version, where a contestant cheated their way to the million. Like a slumdog millionaire kind of vibes? No, like, I don't know, white collar crime

millionaire kind of vibes. Like fraud millionaire kind of vibes. Haven't heard this. Uh-uh. Okay. Okay. So this one, I think we're back off the train of ambiguity. I think there can be no doubt that this is cheating and it will end up of course being prosecuted in a court of law. Okay, yeah. Let's go baby. Who wants to be a millionaire? Very well known quiz show format. In order to get onto the show you complete a test, you get into the hot seat. You answer a series of questions of escalating difficulty with escalating amounts of money until you get to the million dollars. God, that show was so popular. So popular.

I used to host fake Who Wants to be a Millionaire with my Who Wants to be a Millionaire trivia book in sixth grade. I'm still hosting fake game shows for my friends to this day. Yeah, yeah, you are. They're elaborate. Getting more elaborate. As they've gotten more refined in their presentation. Yeah. Yeah, very, very popular. The world over, like Slumdog Millionaire, right? We have an Oscar best picture that's based around the Indian version of this program. December 2000, a guy named

Adrian Pollock gets on the show from the Pool of Fast Finger Contestants. On the UK version, is that right? On the UK version, yes. At the height of its popularity, mind. This is his fourth opportunity in the Pool of Fast Finger Contestants. You get people coming back to try again and again and again to be on the show. Oh, like Contestant Row kind of vibe, yeah.

Yeah, Contestant Row. He finally gets on the show. He makes it to the $64,000 question. He loses there, walks home with $32,000. Not bad. Dollars are pounds. Pounds, pounds. If I say dollars, I mean pounds. Diana and Charles. Not that Diana and Charles.

Diana and Charles Ingram. Diana and Charles Ingram appear on the couple's version of the show show and Diana is Adrian Pollock's sister who was just on and lost and Charles Ingram is her husband. Sort of this affable doofus army major is the vibe that he is portrayed as and gives off. Okay, okay, but I don't know the man. He may be very smart. Uh-huh. And they're on the couples version and Adrian's in the audience, but they don't make it into the hot seat. Oh well. 300 calls to the show later, Diana gets to fast finger round and then she gets into the hot seat just like her brother and just like her brother, she flames out at the $64,000

question, leaves with 32 grand. Okay. Chris Terrant, the host, he runs into her at a bar afterwards and he notes that she's like really dejected and disappointed about her performance. Because he rolls over and he's like, you just got 32,000 pounds. Congratulations. Like what are you gonna do with it? And she's like, whatever.

Here's maybe why you might not have heard of this because the bulk of this story happens on September 9th and 10th, 2001. Okay. So there's some other things happening a little later. Different things, global, global, you know, considerations. September 9th, 2001, after trying for two episodes in the Fast-Fingering Round, Charles Ingram, our affable major and Diana's husband

and Adrian's brother-in-law makes it into the hot seat. So this whole family is clearly. Devoted. That's the vibe. It's actually like really important to them to like get on this show and do well on this show. And they like don't super necessarily take it well when they don't do well on this show. They're deep. They're deep in. They're deep. So maybe like I guess like the toxic side of that pure love of the prices

right that Ted Slosson has we see maybe in this this millionaire obsessive family. Yeah. Charles Ingram makes it into the hot seat. He starts really quickly, burning out on easy questions. He burns his ass at the audience lifeline on a Cornation Street question at like, a thousand or two thousand pounds. He doesn't know a question about a river at four thousand pounds. He has to call his friend Phil, gets it, and that's where the episode cuts off because we kind of sometimes stop the episode in the middle of someone's run. They come back for the next episode.

Yeah. The timing works out better that way. Because I, yeah, I forget there's like a, you can phone a friend. You can ask the audience. Ask the audience. And okay, yeah, eliminate some options. Okay. It's four options and the 50-50 will eliminate two.

Yeah. In between days, Chris Tarrant and all the producers are kind of feeling bad for this guy because he kind of comes off like he does not know what he's doing and is not really that good at the show. He's made a big deal about how he's promised his daughter Ponies. There's this like family angle to it because of course the family's there in the crowd and they'll cut and they'll be like, yo, your family keeps coming on the show and burning out at 32K, huh? Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah. So there's like an angle to it now too. So the next day Charles Ingram comes in and what's happened in between tapings is that the Irwins talk to another one of the regulars from the Fast Fingers pool. Okay. They talk to this guy, Tecwin Whittick. He's a regular

and they get him and we so we've got like Diana on camera in the audience like looking back and forth and sending like Houston astros signals to him Yeah He joins in on the scam and the way that the scam works is this four options to any question Let's say the question is what's the first color in a rainbow red orange yellow or blue right? What would then happen is that Charles Ingram would go like Wow, those are some interesting answers Hmm yellow. I wonder if it's yellow,

or it could be blue. Maybe it's red. Yeah. Oh. From the audience, the cough is... Well from contestants row, it's the Sky Tecwan Whittic. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Is the plan. But we've got Diana there in the background and she will come down with a cough at her own during one crucial point

of this whole affair. Oh no. As the show goes on, it becomes really clear that Charles Ingram both doesn't know how to play this well and is going to cheat his way all the way to the million. He's gonna continue to, because you can stop and leave with what you have at a certain point. Yeah. Even when you see the questions, he's just gonna keep going for it, but he also is very bad at the kabuki of it, the theater of it,

right? Because the way he's choosing the answer makes no sense. For example, 32k, he's got one lifeline left. They ask which UK artist had an album called Born to Do It. He uses his 50-50, it comes down to A1 and Craig David. The whole time he's been making this big show about like, I have no idea who Craig David is, I've never heard of them, I'm pretty sure it's A1, I'm pretty sure it's A1, I'm pretty sure it must be A1, it must be A1. The right answer of course is... Craig David. Craig David.

And the guy in Contestant Row doesn't know this, so it has to be Princess Diana who comes in from the crowd. As in pick the second one, pick the second one. And so Chozingrum says, out of nowhere. Well, 80% of the time I'm wrong when I guess. You know what? I'll go with Craig David. Final answer. Oh, yeah. No, no. You gotta smooth that one out. Yeah, yeah. Production notices this. Diana's been rumbled. People on all stages of production are noticing it at different times. The guy on the floor hears the coughing but doesn't know who's doing it. The person in production doesn't notice the coughing but notices this other

thing. One of the other contestants in Contestants Row, a guy named Larry Whitehurst, figures out what's happening because he's like, this is weird. Yeah, there's some tension in the room here. And this guy keeps coughing like he'll turn it right at the stage. Yeah. At $250,000, what kind of a garment is an Antony Eden? It's a hat we get on tape. The mics pick up, Techwin turning to the person next to him. What is that? That's like a hat, right? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Anytime he talks about the hat. 500,000 barren housemen is known for his planning of which city? Rome, Paris, Berlin, or Athens. And right away, Charles Ingram, it's, I think it's Berlin. It's Berlin. I know it's Berlin. It must be Berlin. It's so obviously Berlin. His name is's Berlin. I know it's Berlin. It must be Berlin. It's so obviously Berlin His name is houseman Berlin Berlin Berlin. I know it's Berlin Berlin no costs because it's not fucking Berlin And this guy cannot get off Berlin not going around like he's supposed to and then finally Tecwan Whittock has to go Not subtle yeah, but manages to sneak by Chris Terrent the host doesn't hear it.

Oh my god. So he's like really rattled by this Charles Ingram and he goes, well it's not, it's not Paris. Okay, yeah it is, yeah it is. I think it's Paris. I know I'm just gonna go, well I've got Paris final answer. It's correct of course. Oh my god, oh my god.

15 questions in $1 million, the number one followed by 100 zeros is known by what name? Google, megachon, gigabit, or nanomole? Josie, do you know this? It's one followed by how many zeros? By 100 zeros. One followed by 100 zeros. Is it Google, megachon, gigabit, or nanomole? It's Google.

It is Google, you would be a millionaire. There you go. I feel it. I feel it washing over me. Tron, Gigabit, or Nanimal. It's Google. It is Google. You would be a millionaire. There you go. I feel it. I feel it washing over me. We again hear Whittak in Contestant Roe, because this is all amplified audio, including the coughing.

They make the coughing much louder on this documentary. This is called Major Fraud. OK. It's quite clear what's happening when they do this. And this episode doesn't end up airing, so this is actually they've pieced it together as a court exhibit as evidence and then they just released it on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire YouTube channel.

Because it's infamous, right? It's the most infamous Who Wants to be a Millionaire incident. Ingram totally biffs it. I don't even know what a Google is. Cough, cough, cough, cough. Oh, I think I'm gonna go with a Google. Oh my god. And the wife is like, oh god, don't. We go to a break. They call the higher-ups at the production company, Sellador, to see if this should be stopped because they're like We have a gut instinct this guy's do we don't know how just yet. We haven't put all the pieces together yet There's something yeah, yeah something weird is happening here and the word comes back if you only have gut instinct You can't stop the show just run it and we'll shelf it if we need to just play it

Yeah, it makes sense from like just a production like we're all here everything's running like unless we have hard proof Let's just run it. Yeah, that's how it goes. He wins the million dollars Whitehurst is glaring from contestants row because of all people this is the guy who's like put the entire thing together He knows the whole mystery. Yeah, he's like, oh, he's coughing on the answers. Yeah, he's figured it out Usually this would be like a big deal when someone wins a million dollars and the crew would be so excited. Oh my god, a millionaire. It's just like limp.

They don't know what's going on. And apparently other people who weren't celebrating when they should have, apparently in the backstage dressing room, big, big, big fight between Charles and Diana that everybody could hear them yelling at each other, particularly her yelling at him. Oh, because he didn't do it convincingly enough? Because he sucked ass and was greedy and was not good.

It looked fake. Yeah, yeah. He should have taken the dive at a certain point and just been like, uh, I'm just gonna take the money. Yeah, don't hold up the bank here. Yeah, yeah. I see hold up the bank here. Yeah. Yeah, I see you're saying yeah No one's gonna pay attention to like a shitty guy who bumbled his way to like a hundred K People will pay attention to like the third millionaire in the show's history

And that think just the idea of like you win a million dollars and then your wife is yelling at you It's like you this something is up something is But I also get the sense that he was like the hired muscle in her scheme Maybe and she was just kind of having like a heated lady Macbeth moment with him, you know Next right after Techwin Whittock ends up winning the fastest finger round. He goes up and sits in the chair cough mysteriously vanished she must have drank some lemon tea with honey in between in between segments Fresh coat tea with honey in between segments. First coat. Gross. Yep. And he ends up leaving with 1K.

What's to come next? Of course, the million people go over the footage. They hear it. A guy named Paul Smith calls Charles Ingram to say, by the way, we've spotted some irregularities. You're not getting the money. We have not authorized this being aired and we have gone to the police. He's kind of like, well, I mean, that's a bummer, I refute that, but that's, it's very civil

otherwise. Yeah, yeah, I disagree. Yeah, well, that's your point of view, that's your truth. Yeah. Big trial ensues. During the trial, multiple people from the production company, along with fastest finger contestant, Larry Whitehurst, pointed the finger fast and brought their evidence against the Ingrams and Whittic. The Ingrams get a suspended sentence of 18 months. Whittic gets a suspended sentence of 12 months. They all three receive fines and were required to pay costs. This wouldn't be Charles Ingram's last brush with fraud law. He would be convicted of an unrelated insurance fraud offense in 2003. The Ingrams would go on to appear on other reality shows and quiz shows. They've been a TV mini-series about this, and they've even appeared on the Bittersweet

Infamy podcast along with... Look at that! ...many other luminaries in the great history of game show scandals including now the ever pure Josie Mitchell who did not cheat because she didn't know the opportunity was right in front of her. Yeah. What do you think of our game show episode all in our game show cheating episode, our game show scandal episode? It's one for the books my dude. It is one for the books. Truly one for the books. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I hope the good books. I hope Encyclopedia Britannica. Taylor's imagination knows no bounds, dude.

Not only does his imagination not know any bounds, his follow-through knows no bounds. I just wanted to inspire delight. Man, dude, you got me? And then you got me again? It was a double getting Boy, I really got you If you want to talk about ways that I specifically got you uh-huh. It's time to read the car Oh, right. I I

Wasn't even there with that. Yes, this beautiful white brass clasped box. I'm ready. This was, I had that locked up with it. Like the special vault that the banker with all the questions, that was my version of that. You're gonna keep this note and it will become, you know, another item that we can guess the price of. Horde. Even though it's priceless, yeah.

The card says as follows, dear Taylor, as you were unable to deliver upon the premise of your dark experiment, we no longer have any use for you, Josie, or indeed Bitter Sweet Infamy on the 604 podcast network. Please terminate all personnel immediately, Chad Kroger. Daddy Chattie? Daddy Chattie just fired us because I fucked up my experiment. Daddy Chattie, that's intense dude! That wasn't really Chad Kroger I wrote that. Okay, feel whole.

To be fair. But yeah, game over, that's it. End of the show, end of the episode, we're done forever. Come back February! Yeah! For Bitter Sweet Romance, Bitter Sweet Romance from Love Stories. We're gonna be telling you some twisted love stories. Ah, wait, we're still in the 604 podcast now, right?

Yes, oh my god, yes, that was all fake. I got you again! Ah, damn! Boom, boom! The Hints Keep Coming! Whoa, Doug, I'm gonna walk outside the door and be like, am I true and showed? Like, I don't know what's happening!

Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes I true and showed, like I don't know what's happening. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinthamy.com. Or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you wanna support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account. K-O-F-I-dot-com forward slash bittersweetinthamy.

But no pressure. Bittersweet infamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing. First and of course a huge thank you to both Dylan and Jonathan for contributing their time, energy and effort not just to today's episode but to supporting the podcast in general. And thank you to all of you out there who are doing the same. We really really appreciate it. We hope you had fun with today's episode as much fun as we had pulling it together. My sources for this episode include Prawo Yazdi, mystery of Ireland's worst driver is solved in the Belfast

Telegraph February 19th 2009. I also watched the documentaries Big Bucks, the Pressure Lux scandal, American Experience, the Quiz Show scandal, Perfect Bid, The Contestant Who Knew too much, and major fraud. I looked at the Wikipedia pages, Charles Van Doren, 1950s quiz show scandals, who wants to be a millionaire, and Charles Ingram. We also used a clip from the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire broadcast of Charles Ingram plundering his million dollar question. BitterSweetEnfamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. We are forever indebted to our monthly supporters Jonathan, MoM and Erica, Joe Brown for their contributions to both BitterSweetEnfamy and BitterSweetEnbush. If you want to join them and get monthly access to our film club, including our recent episode

on Heavenly Creatures and our upcoming episode on the honeymoon killers, you should go to ko-fi.com slash bittersweet and become a subscriber. Lots of music to credit this week, including Young and Alive by Diamond underscore tunes, bingo crazy by Richard Bodger's thinking time by music, underscore four underscore videos. The track that we played during the big reveal was actually composed by Mitchell Collins for our upcoming game

Myrtle Porter murder reporter more on that soon I promise a lot of drawing I was more I didn't know how much drawing I was taking on here but it's coming this song you're listening to right now of course is T Street by Brian Steele we will see you weekly in February with some love stories for bittersweet romance. Thanks for putting up with this. Don't think it's a gigabit. I don't think it's an animal. Megatron, mega, mega, mega, mega. Yeah.

I don't think it's Megatron. I'm sure it's Google. Surely, surely, surely. Chris, I'm going to play. No, I'm not. Yes, I am. Oh. I'm going to play. I am. Oh. Yeah. I'm going to play. I am going to play. Yeah.

You do not have to play this question. There's nothing on my screen here. You do not have to play this. You've got £500,000. I wish I could turn around and see. I wouldn't. Charles, do not look around. Trust me, let's do not look around.