The Parlor Pinkertons

"How long can the quiz shows last?" gloomed Master of Ceremonies Jack (Twenty-One) Barry one day last week, in the midst of staging an unemployment insurance debut as a song-and-dance man at Atlantic City's half-packed 500 Club. Plump and 40, Barry danced stiffly, told gags, talked his way through songs, though he is no Rex Harrison, and made a brief pass at a piano. Actually, Barry need not worry about his future in TV's quiz world. This summer the major networks have unleashed no fewer than ten quiz giveaway shows to fight their way to fall billing.

The new shows may not pack much fun, but they ooze prizes. Winners have carted away $14,000 cabin cruisers, a day's traffic tolls of the Golden Gate Bridge, a thoroughbred entered in the '59 Kentucky Derby. Home participation via postcard is so common that the U.S. post office probably hauls in more loot than the contestants. A quiz sampler:

Play Your Hunch (NBC) pits a pair of husband-and-wife teams against each other in an outright guessing game. The brain twisters include such pithy problems as which of three baby pictures is that of Jayne Mansfield, or who of three turbaned men is bald. Televiewers who play the right hunch will soon guess which knob is marked OFF.

Dotto is so hotto just at the moment that it plays on rival networks--CBS, which launched the show earlier this year, by day, and a new NBC slot at night. A "champion" and a "challenger" must solve a picture puzzle consisting initially of a spattering of dots. To connect the dots and get the picture's outlines clearer, contestants must answer questions. When the picture is guessed, e.g., the face of Napoleon, the winner is rewarded at a base-pay scale of $20 per unconnected dots. This may soar with such refinements as Double Dotto, Triple Dotto and Double Double Dotto. Home players can get in on the act by giving their answers via telephone.

Haggis Baggis (NBC) is related to Dotto, and the game time-clocks its contestants against five-letter categories, e.g., a food beginning with "b," a farm product beginning with "h." The right answers disclose sections of some famous face on a screen. Like Dotto, a daytime-nighttime show, H-B's nighttime segment is emceed by 20-year-old Jack Linkletter, son of Art Linkletter, famed radio-TV master of ceremonies (People Are Funny). The show's catchy title means nothing, though the haggis is a famed and gamy Scots dish cooked in a sheep's stomach. A recent panel of contestants looked very haggis when it uncovered the entire face of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and failed to identify him.

Lucky Partners (NBC) caters to the home bingo crowd. Under the word L-U-C-K-Y appears a series of numbers. Questions come marked L3, C5, Y7, etc., each worth that number of points. Sample stumper ("verified by the editorial research board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica"): "What famous World War II general said 'I shall return'?" Home audience participation is invited by two of TV's living dolls, always present but rarely busy (they also serve who only stand and undulate).

Bid 'n' Buy (CBS), an imitator of NBC's successful The Price Is Right, is perhaps the most artful personification of greed among the new crop of grab-the-swag shows. Hosted by Cyclonic Ham Bert Parks in the guise of an auctioneer, the show parcels out $5,000 in cash to each of four contestants to bid for the clues they wish to buy. The clues, in the form of rhymed couplets ("Morning, noon and night, you'll find me tight") may help the player guess the identity of an object silhouetted behind a scrim curtain (in this case, an electric light socket). Other times, the clues, and an accompanying cartoon, may refer to persons or sayings. The program is somewhat complicated by such intramural banking as selling one's clues in midshow for a $1,000 consolation prize. The prizes are all highly consoling, from Bergdorf Goodman minks to tickets to the London production of My Fair Lady, not so much to see the show as to pick up one night's box office receipts (dollar estimate: $5,700). A super-prize is being mulled: an entire island off the coast of Scotland, complete with railroad station, stores, homes and a small hotel. After that--Bert Parks?

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