What Might've Been: He Said, She Said (1969)

Former baseball player Joe Garagiola swapped his spikes for a microphone, but it wasn't just to move to the broadcast booth.

A catcher with the St. Louis Cardinals in his playing days, Garagiola became a fixture on TV between the late 60's and mid-80's. He called NBC's Saturday Game of the Week, either as a color analyst or play-by-play commentator, the latter usually with ex-Yankee Tony Kubek. However, Garagiola filled the rest of the week---well, except Sunday---doing game shows.

In all, Garagiola hosted four game shows, plus his Monday night pre-game show, The Baseball World of Joe Garagiola, between the late 60's and mid-to-late 70's. Two of those gigs he inherited from someone else---To Tell The Truth, which he took over from Garry Moore upon the latter's retirement in 1977, and the original Sale of the Century (from actor Jack Kelly) a few years earlier. Being based in New York, where he also contributed to NBC's Today Show, might've had a lot to do with those game show gigs, too.

In 1969, Garagiola began an association with Mark Goodson & Bill Todman, tapped to host He Said, She Said, a game that pitted four couples, usually celebrities, against each other. One variation on the format had one celebrity couple against three civilian pairs. Either way, the syndicated series lasted one season, though a pilot for a revival was produced in 1971, a year after the series ended.

Part of the reason the show failed, at least from where I sit, wasn't because it was in syndication in the daytime, but rather another case of a show being ahead of its time. In those days, network daytime programming was seemingly in a constant state of flux, especially when it came to game shows. Back then, it was more common for networks to schedule game shows at 4 pm (ET), though some affiliates apparently had the option to move them to earlier air times so they could use the 4 pm hour for syndicated programming that was much more profitable to local advertisers.

Here's a sample episode, uploaded off a broadcast on Game Show Network.



Goodson-Todman didn't give up on the concept, though. In 1974, a retooled version, with three celebrity couples instead of four, and with the entire audience involved, bowed on CBS as Tattletales, which had two runs of its own (1974-8, 1982-4), hosted by actor Bert Convy. That series was taped in Hollywood, while Garagiola remained in New York. Truth would be his last game show.

Rating: B-.