Airing: 4-4:30 p.m. Monday- Friday from January 1-June 13 and December 1 on, 11-11:30 a.m. June 16-August 15, 3:30-4 p.m. August 18-November 28, CBS.

Personnel: Bert Convy, host; Jack Clark, Gene Wood, announcers. A Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Production. Taped in Los Angeles.

Description: How well do your favorite celebrity couples know each other?

Game Play: Played in four rounds, with three celebrity couples competing. At the start of the show, the husbands were backstage and unable to hear their wives’ responses to a question posed by Convy, generally in multiple-choice form. The wives would give their answer, and then the husband would reappear via a monitor in front of the wife. Correct answers would result in a share of $150 ($150 if one couple answered correctly, $75 each if two couples answered correctly, and $50 each if all three responded correctly). Two rounds were played in this manner, then the couples would switch places and play additional two more rounds, with the final round worth $300. If none of the couples’ answers matched in any round, the cash available for the round would be added to the subsequent one. The couple with the highest score at the end of the game was awarded an additional $1,000. The money was divided among the couples’ rooting sections – i.e., the studio audience, which was divided into red, yellow (or "Banana"), and blue sections.

End Game: None.

Background: Here’s proof that Goodson-Todman took awhile to perfect their ideas. The primitive version of Tattletales was called It Had to Be You. A pilot was made in 1966, with Ed McMahon (who had previously hosted G-T’s Missing Links as host). Assumedly made for NBC, it wasn’t picked up. (I wonder when it was made relative to the debut of Chuck Barris’ The Newlywed Game, which shares many similarities to Tattletales.)

Tattletales’ immediate predecessor was He Said, She Said, a 1969-70 New York-based low-budget program with four celebrity couples competing for specific couples in the studio audience, with the winner receiving a week’s vacation at a Holiday Inn (wonder where the Holiday Inn was located… Canarsie? Scarsdale? Perth Amboy?). Joe Garagiola hosted the show, his first game. In the 1970s, he hosted Joe Garagiola’s Memory Game and Sale of the Century for NBC, then replaced Garry Moore on To Tell the Truth, all while working on NBC’s Today and baseball programs. In the 1986, he would helm Strike It Rich for a season.

Gene Rayburn hosted a pilot called Celebrity Match Mates in 1972, but by the time CBS picked up the show, Rayburn was running Match Game ’74, so Convy, a singer and actor who had been a frequent panelist on What’s My Line? and MG, was tapped for the job. Tattletales replaced the long-running soap The Secret Storm.

Convy Job: One of the favorite tricks of the producers was to occasionally have Bert Convy and his wife, Anne, sit in on the panel, and have one of the other G-T hosts run the show. Gene Rayburn, Bob Barker, and Bobby Van all temporarily hosted Tattletales as a result.

Tales of Woe: Nothing like moving a program around three times in one year to see how loyal your audience is. Tattletales already was up against it in the 4 p.m. spot, prone to pre-emptions and low clearances (although it outlasted Somerset on NBC and The Money Maze on ABC) when CBS moved it to 11 a.m. in June, after Gambit. Two months later, CBS moved The Price Is Right back to the mornings, Match Game ’75 to 3 p.m. and Tattletales to 3:30, before its weak replacement, Musical Chairs (which aired at 1 p.m. in some markets). In December, MG and Tattletales moved back to the time slots they had had at the beginning of the year, and All in the Family reruns took over at 3 p.m. I should point out many local stations aired Tattletales in different time slots; you may remember it airing at 1 p.m. or 9:30 a.m.

Tattletales hung in at 4 p.m. until December of 1977, when CBS moved it again to 11 a.m., switching it with Match Game ’77. It lasted another four months before being dropped by CBS in favor of Bill Cullen’s Pass the Buck. A weekly syndicated edition that started in September 1977 was also dropped in 1978.

Bert of Course: With CBS having no luck with its 4 p.m. slot, Tattletales came back in January 1982, with an identical format and Convy returning as host. (In New York and some other markets, Tattletales aired at 12 noon.) This version lasted another two and a half years to June 1984, when Mark Goodson’s Body Language replaced it. A few months later, Convy took the reins of NBC’s Super Password, which wound up as his longest-running show, sticking around from September 1984 to March 1989.

Convy had several prime-time series showcasing his talents as an actor (It’s Not Easy), singer (The Late Summer Early Fall Bert Convy Show), and… well, a man who introduced goofy video clips (People Do the Craziest Things). He also went into production as well, co-producing Win, Lose or Draw and Third Degree with Burt Reynolds (and hosting both as well in syndication). He was set to host ABC’s 1990 revival of Match Game when a brain tumor forced him off the program. He died in 1991.

• "You’re stranded on a desert island…" Leading into a hypothetical question, this seemed to happen an awful lot to the celebrity couples on this show. Fortunately, it didn’t happen much in real life. In some cases with today’s celebrities, you might wish it did happen.
• "We’ll come back after this and give the Banana section their bananas." Convy quickly dubbed the yellow section of the studio audience the Banana section, and the audience members felt the need to justify the name.

The Home Game: I previously stated here since Tattletales was played entirely by celebrities, a home game would have been impossible. In truth, there never was a home game, but it didn't miss by much: Milton Bradley promoted a home game in 1978, but never issued one. Check Matt Ottinger's Game Show Home Game Home Page for details.