Quiz Show

After 50 years as host of "It's Academic," the longest-running quiz show on television, Mac McGarry, the longest-tenured host, says that "it's really time" to step down. "I'm 85 years old and gone way beyond Social Security," the Potomac resident said Thursday. "A lot of things are getting to me like this sinus trouble. Right now my eyes are watering, and I thought, 'My gosh, would I be able to read the cards?' Generally speaking, I'm in good health, but these minor things make you realize you might be losing a step here or there.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Cue music. (Man with accordion assaults the ears.) Lights! (They flicker a bit, but the studio brightens.) Cameras! (The picture seems slightly unfocused, but it will do.) And ... finally: Live, from Afghanistan! It's Saturday night! (So what if it's only live in a sort-of kind-of way.) More than 700 people applaud wildly. Those who can whistle do. For after more than six years in the dark, Afghanistan's longest-running, even if limping, variety and quiz show is back on the airwaves, drawing standing-room-only crowds to the theater where it is taped and attracting people to the country's few remaining televisions like moths to light bulbs.

You have to see it to believe it, and even then you want to nudge the person next to you and ask: "Have we somehow entered a parallel universe here?"What you're watching is America's newest quiz show, ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" a campy half-hour unlike probably any other game show you've seen.For openers, there's omnipresent music that swells so B-movie ominously you half expect Bela Lugosi to lurch across the set.Then there's the audience, which encircles the host and contestants like an edgy fight crowd at a Vegas casino.

Two days after receiving fourth runner-up honors at the annual Miss America pageant, you may find Miss Maryland Camille Lewis at a nearby video store. The 23-year-old Silver Spring native will more than likely be renting local filmmaker John Waters' Hairspray, after missing a question about the movie's setting during a quiz show-style round of questioning Saturday night. "I wouldn't mind seeing that," she said of the Baltimore-based '80s flick. "I'm very open to researching that movie."

SOPHIE ALTMAN, 95 Creator of TV's 'It's Academic' Television producer Sophie Altman, who created the long-running quiz show It's Academic, pitting teams of high school students against each other, died of heart disease Saturday at Georgetown University Medical Center, said her daughter, Nancy Altman of Bethesda. Altman was a seasoned TV producer in 1961 when she started It's Academic in the Washington area. The quiz show is entering its 48th season in Washington, and there are local versions in Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and several other cities; at one point more than 20 cities had their own versions.

I'm disappointed to learn that I blindly missed a defining moment in American history.This has come to my attention in the many gushing reviews of a new movie called "Quiz Show."The movie is loosely based on the true story of how a popular TV quiz show from the 1950s called "Twenty-One" was rigged to heighten suspense and boost ratings and profits.Most of the critics say the movie is of great significance because the quiz-show scandal marked the loss of our national innocence.Americans were supposedly stunned to discover that they couldn't believe everything they saw on their rabbit-eared TV sets.

Ever wonder what would happen if they crossed "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebeck and "McLaughlin Group" leader John McLaughlin? Anne Robinson, host of British game show import "The Weakest Link," could be the answer. The quiz show, which makes its debut tonight at 8 on NBC (Channel 11), at first seems to bear a resemblance to "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" (also a British import), with its flashy set and questions worth more and more as each round progresses. But there are definitely some differences.

"The Honeymooners' Anniversary Special" is a triple dip of pretty terrific television.It's funny and it entertains, all right. But the CBS salute to "The Honeymooners," which will air at 10 tonight on WBAL-TV (Channel 11), offers more than laughs.It offers a look at one of the ways we were in the 1950s. It is a way that is considerably at odds with the popular notion of a monolithic, prosperous, suburban and tranquil nation of I-Like-Ikers. The special also is good enough that for a moment or two some viewers will lose track of time, and feel as if it is 1952 and they are watching Ralph and Alice doing battle and making peace in the drab kitchen that was the Kramdens' universe.

Joe Russo, Hammond High's first and only head football coach, announced at a meeting of county football coaches that he has resigned as the Bears coach.Russo, 54, has a 22-year career record of 119 wins and 101 losses -- all at Hammond. The Bears posted a 1-9 record this season.The Bears never won a Howard county title and their best record was 8-2 in 1985.In 1990, his team had three running backs with 1,000-yard rushing seasons, including Kelly Woodward, John Bell and Mario Mason.Currently, two of his players are enjoying outstanding Division I college careers -- Tim Spruill at Virginia and Ron Gamble at Connecticut.

Redfield Mason, an Indiana farm boy who helped the Navy break the Japanese military code in World War II, then won national fame when he won $100,000 on a television quiz show with an unlikely mastery of Greek and Roman mythology, died July 9 at a nursing home in Warrenton, Va. He was 91.His family said he had lived on a farm near Warrenton since his retirement from the Navy as a rear admiral in 1966.In a 45-year naval career, Admiral Mason, who grew up on a farm in Martinsville, Ind., graduated from the Naval Academy in 1925, learned Japanese at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo in the 1930s and was decorated for his command of naval support operations in the Korean War.As an intelligence officer at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington in World War II, he helped break the Japanese code.