I don’t know what it is but lately I’ve been getting into sixties and seventies US shows that I’ve been meaning to watch for years and never actually got round to, this time it’s Treasure Hunt, or The New Treasure Hunt seeing as it was based on a show from the fifties, and produced by envelope-pushing producer enfant terrible Chuck Barris, whose schtick (namely shows which mine comedy out of reactions, embarrassment, and the bizarre – such as The Newlywed Game and the currently rebooted The Gong Show) would have fitted right in today.
The game is as light as it comes – women are effectively chosen at random from the audience through some whittling games of luck. The winner picks a box, it might have a klunk (i.e. something of little value) or it might have something really good in it, possibly the grand prize cheque. Each box comes with a cash value attached, and they can take the money or the box. And that’s it.
Except the meat of the show lies with the reveal. There’s a skit to go with each prize, some of these several minutes long, and host Geoff Edwards does a great job of marshalling things along, letting the gag build, quite a lot of the time many of the skits suggest they’ve won a klunk only to discover that actually they’ve won a bigger prize, or a bigger klunk. And sometimes this iterates several times.
Here is quite a notorious clip, there’s quite a lot on Youtube: