Bedtime Stories

Bedtime Stories is a game show produced in 1979 by Heatter-Quigley Productions for first-run daily syndication. The hosts, Al Lohman and Roger Barkley, previously worked together on Name Droppers, another Heatter-Quigley show.

Hosts
Al Lohman and Roger Barkley

Gameplay
Two married couples competed. Living up to the new openness of the late 1970s, along with an obvious bent to be just for laughs, the show opens with a set of two bedroom sets (known as "the tacky beds") and a brief talk by Lohman/Barkley. Then, the two couples who would be playing in this game are interviewed in what are purportedly their bedrooms, one couple interviewed by Lohman and the other by Barkley. These interviews are very similar to what The Daily Show interviews look like today, with answers given to questions that were added in post-production. So after about 10 minutes of these introductions, we can finally start the game.

The couples are then brought out to the tacky beds, which are actually just benches with headboards as backing. Each couple then is asked a question based on a survey with two possible answers (e.g.: Many couples have a special feeling when they meet. Is that feeling love or lust?). Each correct guess of the more popular answer garnered each couple $500 in prizes. After three of these questions, a fourth question was asked that was worth $2,000 in prizes. In this round, the couples wrote their answers down rather than giving an oral response since they were trying to see who would be closer to a survey result.

Not much is remembered about the show when it finally aired. According to The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows, the first two weeks of the show featured three questions played for $500 in cash, with no fourth question. After those two weeks, the format changed to each couple being asked questions before taping, with the other couple trying to guess how the first couple answered for $500 per question.