Quiz Show: ‘We thought we were going to get TV … but TV has got us instead’.

I have at last managed to see for the second time the astonishingly good film ‘Quiz Show’, made in 1994 about the true-life scandals affecting American TV quiz shows in the 1950s. I first watched it on a long-ago weekend in Philadelphia, during a brief break in my then pursuit of Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader who had been given a visa by Bill Clinton, to visit, propagandise and fund-raise in the USA. Somehow it fell to me, as Washington correspondent of another newspaper, to follow him around asking him unwelcome questions.

Mr Adams and I got on so well together that he once suggested in a Washington DC press conference that it was time I was  ‘decommissioned’. I felt a glow of pride, and something else as well, not quite so pleasant, whatever was it…?

But I digress. As I watched ‘Quiz Show’, I thought it must surely become a much-talked about classic.

It is a rather beautiful film, including a bold attempt to recreate the optimistic America of the 1950s (so very different from the grey, scraped, tired Britain of the same era), when TV was still a novelty. People who go on (in my view rather inexplicably) about the dull, dull, dull TV series ‘Mad Men’, standby of every magazine and fashion page for months past, might take a look at ‘Quiz Show’ to see a rather more lively and realistic recreation of the fashions, attitudes and manners of that time.

There are several wonderful moments in which the corruption of the soul is shown in exactly the form it takes in real life – that is, blithely smiling, very hard to resist, and clothed in acceptable excuses. There is also, in the character of Charles van Doren, an illustration of the old truth that the corruption of the best is the worst of all.

The heart of the plot is a Congressional investigation into the rigging of big-prize TV quiz shows. The director, Robert Redford, concentrates on Van Doren because he is a genuinely knowledgeable, well-read, thoughtful man, the youngest in a family of revered intellects and writers. At one stage he is shown at a family gathering, crammed with great literary names. His father refers to James Thurber casually as a friend, as he was. The men trade Shakespeare quotations and historical references. They don’t own TVs or watch TV and they aren’t frightened by the rapid takeover of culture by television, despite T.S. Eliot’s warning some years before, in a famous letter to the London ‘Times’.

In one scene freighted with foreboding, the young Van Doren gives his father Mark (played by the wonderful Paul Scofield) a TV set for his birthday. You know that this means the old, intellectual life at his handsome Connecticut farm will come to an end, just as it will end throughout the modern world as the great conformist box steals the minds of millions, and atrophies their imaginations.

I won’t give too much away in case any of you decide to watch the film, which was as good as I remembered it being, if not better with the passage of 18 years (the even older film ‘Witness’, another film that ought to be a classic but somehow isn’t, likewise stands up to the years very well). But there are two prophetic scenes: one in which a cynical character says there is no real point in having difficult quiz shows which need clever people to appear on them – easy ones with simple answers will do just as well (as it has proved) - and another in which the Congressional investigator sighs, ‘We thought we were going to get TV … but TV has got us instead’.