Groucho's You Bet Your Life comedy-quiz show was a huge hit on radio in the late 1940s, but would it translate to the new and increasingly popular medium of television? Nobody could be sure. In December of 1949, a pilot was shot on 16mm film, to see if anyone cared to watch a nearly sixty-year-old man sitting on a chair and asking questions of average, everyday contestants. You Bet Your Life ran on TV for an impressive twelve years. Here, then, is the rare, original 1949 pilot, complete with mistakes, false starts, ad-libs, and a very nervous, thirty-year-old announcer named George Fenneman.
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