Why I watch Jeopardy

Why I watch Jeopardy

I have a secret I don’t want anyone to know. I will share it with you now if you promise not to tell anyone. I have started to watch Jeopardy on TV again. By “again,” I mean I watch the current version on TV, after dinner with my wife, now hosted by Ken Jennings. I just had a peek behind the scenes and Ken earns $4 million a year hosting the program. This is not to mention the $4,555,522 he won as a contestant before they gave up and made him the host and producer before the show could go bankrupt. One day I plan to host Jeopardy myself.

Ken Jennings

In Ken’s first episode way back in the day, the Final Jeopardy answer (i.e. question) was: “She’s the first female track and field athlete to win medals in five different events at a single Olympics.” Jennings responded, “Who is Jones?” using only the last name of Marion Jones. Host Alex Trebek said: “We will accept that.” Overall, Jennings gave over 2,700 correct responses over 75 shows on the program. When I watch it myself, I usually average 4–5 correct answers per show, so one day I plan to buy a trumpet and blow my own horn.

Why did I first tune into Jeopardy when it first started a few hundred years ago? To tell the truth, I don’t really remember. You don’t have to tell the truth to appear on Jeopardy, which means Donald Trump is still eligible, but you do have to come up with a lot of correct answers in a bunch of different categories, some of them somewhat weird. How you prepare for all these questions I have no idea. Like everyone else I assume you have to read an entire library, and be very smart.

There’s another answer (the question is “when did you start watching”) and I don’t remember that answer either, but I do remember hearing on TV long ago how Alex Trebek got his own start as an announcer. Apparently a CBC producer heard Alex’s voice on the PR system in a small airport in northern Canada. Whether this is true or urban myth doesn’t matter. It was the fact that his voice was so mellow it attracted interest. Or so smooth. Or professional. He’d had no training to announce flight arrivals. He was just a natural. If you last 37 years as a host on a TV show, making $18 million a year, you must be doing something right.

It was hearing that Trebek had a wonderful voice that first caught my ear. At the time I was driving a truck delivering parcels. I was not a happy camper. I aspired to something better. One day my girlfriend saw an ad in the paper. “Loans now available for radio broadcasting course.” She said I had a wonderful voice and was a great storyteller so I should apply. If she’d said “you are an intolerable gas bag” my radio career might never have happened.

Alex Trebek was as well known for his moustache as his golden voice.

I applied at the radio station offering to relieve me of thousands of dollars to make me a radio star and took a test, if you can call it a test. The DJ testing me explained the rules. “Touch the button and start talking. When you pause, stumble, say ‘ah,’ or hesitate for a second, I will turn off the microphone.” This didn’t seem too complicated. Just open your mouth and yak.

This is not the same sort of complexity as Jeopardy when you have to know the amount of bauxite exported by Namibia in 1975, and you have 3 seconds to answer, and you get buzzed off if you don’t reply, and you die of shame. I had a couple of seconds to ponder the process and remembered the morning newspaper that I had just read in the waiting room. I had been reading a daily newspaper my entire life. They always put the juicy bits on the front page, “above the fold” as the saying goes. That morning the headlines were all about a multiple car crash the day before. Gosh, I hate car crashes. Why don’t people learn how to drive properly?

So, I started off with a brief intro to the crash, like a newspaper headline, and summed up the story, and then started ad libbing, leading to some pontification and to be honest you could even include some exaggeration on my part, and the whole time wondering how long I was supposed to talk because lunch time coming up and …..

I didn’t find out how long I was supposed to proceed. The DJ leaned over and turned off the microphone. He stared me in the face directly. “Do you know how long that was?” he asked. “No,” I replied. “Was I supposed to stop somewhere? You didn’t say.” He leaned back in his chair and made some notes on a piece of paper and checked his watch. Then he looked back at me and laughed.

“That was 5 minutes and 37 seconds,” he said, laughing. “The current record was 55 seconds. It sounded to me you could continue on for another hour.”

“Well, if I had to,” I replied. “I was just getting warmed up.”

At that time Alex Trebek was not on my mind, nor was Jeopardy. It appeared I needed some radio training first, not just reading from a piece of paper but all the other complex issues that go into spinning records on the air, like not belching while you talk. Also, remember to always turn the damned mic off when you are spinning tunes because you might say something starting with the letter F when discussing your boss and it goes on the air and you are fired.

Yes, Trebek’s smooth as silk voice was his calling card but his true claim to fame was his facial hair, in particular his famous moustache. It was one of television’s most famous and iconic facial hairstyles. He wore the stache for the first 17 years of hosting Jeopardy! before spontaneously shaving it off during a taping break in 2001. Very seldom does a TV host shaving off a moustache become front page news, but sometimes viewers fall in love with a certain look. Or was it his golden voice?

The author back in the day, much younger but with a golden voice.

This may be time to mention my own mustache. I don’t know why Alex grew his, but mine was originally mandated to cover various scars that I had picked up playing hockey. I didn’t grow it because it looked good on radio. I had it before and after my radio career. It’s still there but now it’s a goatee. Trebek had a goatee at one time, I am told, and he even had a beard when he started his career, and also near the end. The only difference between me and Alex was $18 million a year. Facial hair had nothing to do with it.

My recent return to watching Jeopardy again was due to two main reasons. First, my wife turned it on every night after dinner. Sitting down and joining her led to the chance of her washing the dishes after the show, which is pretty crafty of me if I say so myself. Secondly, it killed time before my sitting down in the other room to watch Netflix, and (just between you and me) I think they should put more good movies on there because I am getting tired of watching Narcos all the time.

Recently my wife and I had the misfortune of having to have a telephone chat with the people from Income Tax. We had to explain to the lady on the other end of the phone, in a soft voice you would use to teach a cocker spaniel puppy not to pee on the floor, why we couldn’t fill in the particular form under discussion. It had been designed, I think, to force people to phone the Income Tax office because it was impossible to figure out the damned thing online. Halfway through the form it went sideways. It needed explanation.

“We are fairly intelligent people,” said my wife to the woman on the other end, “and we have been working on this document for an hour, and it doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, I know,” said the lady on the other end, “That’s why we include the phone number.”

“Perhaps what you could do is hire a writer,” I butted in, “someone who knows how to write. I am not offering my services, because as you can see from the document that we are both retired, but a simpleton could correct this document even if they were blind. If I want to feel stupid, all I have to do is watch Jeopardy. In fact, that’s exactly why I watch that show, because it makes me feel stupid. It’s good for my ego. It makes me humble.”

The Income Tax lady burst out laughing. This may have been the first time she had heard that particular excuse. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” she said, chuckling.

“Well, now that I have you on the phone,” I said, “could you read out loud a copy of War and Peace for us, just to save time? Not the Russian version. The English version will do fine.”