A Short History of the Quiz Show
From 1930s radio to the scandal that nearly killed the format, through Mastermind and Millionaire to the streaming era. How the quiz show became what it is.
The quiz show is nearly a century old, and its shape has been set as much by scandal and regulation as by entertainment.
Radio, 1930s
The format began on American radio. Professor Quiz in 1936 is usually credited as the first, with listeners sending in questions. Information Please turned the idea round: a panel of experts tried to answer questions from the audience, and listeners won money when they stumped them. The BBC’s Round Britain Quiz started in 1947 and is still running, making it the oldest surviving quiz programme anywhere.
Television and the big money, 1950s
Television raised the stakes literally. The $64,000 Question launched in 1955 and was a sensation — contestants in isolation booths, enormous prizes, weeks of build-up around a single person.
The scandal that changed everything
It was rigged. In 1958 it emerged that producers of Twenty-One had been feeding answers to telegenic contestants and instructing others to lose. Charles Van Doren, a Columbia academic who had become a national figure during a long winning run, eventually admitted to Congress that his entire run was scripted.
The fallout was severe. Big-money quizzes vanished from American television almost completely, and US law was changed to make rigging a contest a federal offence. The format only recovered by becoming modest: daytime shows with small prizes and visible fairness.
Britain goes the other way
British television never had the same crisis, partly because strict rules capped prize values for decades. That pushed the BBC and ITV towards difficulty and format invention rather than money.
- University Challenge (1962), adapted from America’s College Bowl, and still built on speed and genuine academic range.
- Mastermind (1972), devised by Bill Wright, a former RAF gunner who had been interrogated by the Gestapo — which is where the black chair, the spotlight and the relentless questioning came from.
- Blockbusters, Fifteen to One, Countdown: formats built on structure rather than jackpots.
Millionaire changes the world, 1998
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was devised in Britain and became the most successfully exported television format in history, licensed to well over a hundred countries. Its innovations — the lifelines, the money ladder, the lighting dropping as the stakes rose, the long pause before "final answer" — are now standard everywhere.
It also produced the format’s most famous modern scandal, the 2001 coughing conviction, later re-examined and dramatised.
The quizzer as character
The 2000s moved the expert from contestant to opponent. The Chase, Eggheads and The Weakest Link made the professional quizzer a recurring personality, which solved an old problem: you can keep a brilliant player on screen indefinitely if they are not the one winning the money.
And now
The format has survived streaming better than most, because it is cheap to make, endlessly repeatable and works as background viewing. The genuine change is that quizzes are now mostly played rather than watched — on phones, in apps, asynchronously against friends. The pub quiz, which long predates all of this, carries on largely unchanged.
Quiz show facts worth knowing
- The Mastermind chair is an original prop and has its own travel case.
- Jeopardy! answers in the form of a question partly as a legacy of the rigging scandal — giving contestants the answer was a way of signalling fairness.
- Countdown was the first programme broadcast on Channel 4, in November 1982.
- University Challenge was off air from 1987 to 1994, and Bamber Gascoigne presented the first run, Jeremy Paxman the second.