Q:  Did Bill Cullen ever do a game in prime time other than The Price Is Right and as a panelist on I've Got a Secret?

A:  Yes he did. Bill was a regular during one of the early years on the panel of The Name's the Same and was also a panelist on Who's There? However, his emcee work at night included Place the Face, the original Name That Tune, Bank on the Stars, the classic word game Down You Go and Quick as a Flash. His last prime time network stint was as host for a four-week CBS revival of I've Got a Secret in 1976. That one bombed: it was opposite Happy Days at the peak of its popularity.

Q:  Why did Bud Collyer not do the syndicated To Tell the Truth, since it was produced the year after it went off the network?

A:  Probably Bud was not tapped because of age, a rather lame but true excuse. He was 60 when the show was revived for syndication and no doubt pressure existed to give the show a younger look, though Garry Moore was 54 when he took over. As for the panel in 1969, Bill Cullen was 49, Peggy Cass 45, Orson Bean 41 and Kitty Carlisle either 59 or 62, depending on the source you believe. Also, Mark Goodson long had a close relationship and, at times, business partnership with Garry and after their many years together with I've Got a Secret, Goodson felt Garry's identity was stronger in launching a new Truth. The ultimate irony is Bud died suddenly on the very week To Tell the Truth returned in the nation's biggest markets. He had done a mystery guest slot on What's My Line? just a few months earlier but developed a sudden circulatory ailment which proved fatal. Bud was one of the most decent men who ever stepped behind a microphone.

Q:  I seem to vaguely remember a show called Picture This many years ago that was something like Win, Lose or Draw but not exactly like it. I told this to somebody and they said I was crazy. Can you help?

A:  You are absolutely not crazy at all. Your friend is. Picture This aired in the summer of 1963 on CBS. Jack Benny owned the show and it was his summer replacement. Ben Joelson and Art Baer created the game. The similarity to Win, Lose or Draw is not a figment of your imagination. The game pitted two celebrity-contestant teams against each other (a la Password). The twist was one team member was told the subject and instructed his or her how to draw it. One example: a porcupine. Alan King told his partner, "Draw an oval on that board. Now, make some long pick-up sticks come out of it....." The only thing you couldn't do was say the name of the subject. The host was Jerry Van Dyke, one of the finest comedy talents ever in television and one of the most miscast emcees ever on a game show.

Most of you who have been with us for these 10 years know I have never been a fan of Survivor and the trend it succeeded in creating in television. Just as I said in a speech to the first Game Show Congress in Colorado, in my view, Survivor and its offspring appealed to the worst qualities in all of us and established a programming genre which is destructive to the human spirit.

Virtually every show established as a derivative of Survivor is as formulaic as a Perry Mason episode but far less entertaining. Brutally backstab, deceive and lie to your fellow man----then show up on the reunion show and say it was "all in the game." Yep. A game which is structured to bring out the worst behavior in its participants, bad behavior which can result in riches.

What I have always loved are the blind loyalists to this show. Let anyone dare say one word of challenge to Survivor and you're immediately a television heretic. That's the equivalent of me offering unvarnished praise to GSN's I've Got a Secret.

I've watched with bemusement at the mini-furor which has erupted over CBS, Mark Burnett and Les Moonves going forward with a Survivor aligning tribes by ethnicity for this fall's competition. Earlier this week, politicians, blacks and Hispanics protested in front of CBS's Black Rock in New York, screaming segregation. The Early Show's Harry Smith looked host Jeff Probst right in the eye and told him he was "dismayed" when he heard of the concept. Critics across the country have excoriated CBS and Burnett for even considering the idea.

I have news for you: CBS and Moonves have absolutely no intention of pulling this show even if the hue and cry went all the way to Congress. The episodes are already shot, in editing, and at an expense of more than $50 million for this 13th competition, the network is not about to eat those bills.

Here is, in no small part, why CBS is doing this: for the very reason the protests and dismay are erupting. They have people talking about the show again, even if in negative tongues. Face it: Survivor has grown soft. Last year, for the first time since it solved CBS's two-decade early evening Thursday night problems five and a half years ago, Survivor's ratings went into a slow decline. Some weeks, the show fell below a double digit rating, even against predominantly weak competition. ABC's Dancing with the Stars defeated Survivor head-to-head in three of their four weeks of head-on battle. The finales and reunion shows on Sunday nights no longer draw the blockbuster ratings of the earlier years. Some standard weekly Thursday episodes now attract more viewers than the Sunday windups.

Survivor did not need a tweak, it needed a cattle prod for the audience. So, Burnett decides to go racial. He and CBS have their wish: the tongues are yapping about the show, though in anything but complimentary terms. That often results in at least a short term curiosity tune-in factor. We'll see what happens in two weeks.

My question: why are these people getting a free pass? Seriously. This is one of those stunts that if any producer who was not considered politically correct (and we apparently have precious few of them these days) attempted to pull a tweak based on race and ethnicity, that individual would be excoriated, spit out and chewed up and unmercifully stomped.

But since this is Les Moonves and Mark Burnett, who have succeeded in making CBS boatloads of money with their betrayalfest, no one in any degree of authority takes the protests seriously. Probst came away with another of his ultimate spins when he told Smith, "Survivor is a social experiment, so this is just another social experiment." That is one of those spin statements which sounds like "wardrobe malfunction," or on a par with the inept explanation Probst gave to CBS 46 in Atlanta after Judge Paschal English was ripped off in the May 2002 finale. I wonder if the production company focus group-tested the "social experiment" line before Probst uttered it.

Just a point to consider: why is it acceptable for Moonves and Burnett to offend pockets of the audience and do so rather blatantly when every hackle would be raised in the network executive suites if a lesser figure proposed the same thing? This reminds me of Gomer Pyle's old line in the classic "Citizen's Arrest" episode of The Andy Griffith Show: "There's one set o' laws for the po-lice and one set o' laws for the rest of us."

I well remember when Vince McMahon Jr. was ripped to shreds for exploiting the Persian Gulf War for a Wrestlemania angle 15 years ago. Of course, that was professional wrestling, which one expects to be offensive. Then, again, Survivor is regularly tweaked and booked like a wrestling show. Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised after all.