Ask the oracle. (Television).(Pick A Box quiz show)(Brief Article)

One of the all-time favourites of Australian TV is coming back to our screens as part of the ALP's "Knowledge Nation" initiative. It's the ratings-topping Pick A Box, the fantastic Channel 9 quiz show which, week by week throughout the 1960s, kept a nation on the edge of its armchairs as legendary brain Barry Jones fired off fusillades of correct answers to questions dredged from the most arcane recesses of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The multi-million-dollar remake, to be funded by union contributions to the Knowledge Nation budget and shown "as a public service" by the ABC in peak time, will again star Barry Jones, now Australia's leading public intellectual and, as befits his omniscience, master-strategist of Knowledge Nation. Quizmaster Bob Dyer, sadly no longer with us, will be played by Phillip Arblaster and Dolly Dyer by Jana Wendt.

Producers say the format of the new Pick A Box will be "pretty well faithful" to the old, though Phillip Arblaster will be "given more space than Bob had to talk about himself" and the avalanche of toasters, holidays at Lennon's Broadbeach Hotel, suites of lounge furniture, Astor radiograms, Victa motor-mowers and shoddy English cars that Barry regularly picked from the boxes and carried away as prizes will be "updated to reflect the priorities of Knowledge Nation--you know, genetic-cloning equipment, satellite-tracking devices, that sort of thing." The questions, though, will depart completely from the earlier "name the ...