Black and white class.(What's My Line?, game show analysis)

"What's My Line?"--America's long-time favorite guessing game--aired with no repeats from 1950 to 1967. Then it lay forgotten, a part of TV history. Until recently: The old tapes have now been revived by the Game Show Network.

The program currently runs in the dead of the night (when modern audiences are presumably so desperate for entertainment they'll watch black and white shows). Like most TV from the period, it looks crude and ancient, like security-camera footage from King Tut's tomb. The set appears to be six feet wide, and you feel the presence of giant cameras moving like elephants on casters. When someone introduces a panelist as a redhead it seems impossible. They're like living marble, these people.

And yet, the dialogue is often so smart and witty it leaves a modern viewer pining for this lost broadcasting era. If only some producer would marry the smart sets and classy camera angles of Now with the classy people and smart language of Then.

The show's premise was simple--the panel tried to guess the guest's profession. Some jobs seemed designed not to fit the guest. If it was a squinty pious-looking geezer, there was a fair chance he designed bras; if the guest was a dainty little slip of a thing she was probably a bullfighter. But most of the time you'd get people cut from the familiar bolts of white America--big florid-nosed men who sold hangover pills, frumpy old-movie Ma types who tested alarm clocks, elegant women with Emily Post accents who happened to be ambassadors to picturesque nations.

But no one watched to learn about the guests. People watched to play the game with some warm friends: Bennett, Dorothy, Arlene, and John.

The host was John Charles Daly, a network-news anchorman with such class, verbal dexterity, and casual authority he'd be banished to C-SPAN today.

Bennett Cerf--he of the Cheney hunch, little-boy grin, and nasally voice--ran Random House Publishers, wrote newspaper columns, and flew across the land to give lectures to garden-club types when he wasn't gameshowing. He fought to get Ulysses published. He was Ayn Rand's editor (would you want that job?). He was the quintessential middlebrow ...