Host Gets Right Answer To Wrong Question

The glamorous TV host was stunned - and suspicious. The caller had the right answer to the wrong $60,000 question.

When host Mara Venier asked the name of pop singer Franco Califano’s latest album, the excited caller responded with Juliet Menyel.

That, however, answered the evening’s originally scheduled question: What is the name of actor Alessandro Gassman’s mother?

“How is it possible you answered the question we were going to ask?” Venier cried into the telephone on live TV Sunday night. “Who told you the question?”

The line went dead. But the flamboyant Venier kept raging into the receiver. Later, she said the show’s writers had switched the question because they were suspicious. She did not elaborate.

“There’s 100 million lire ($60,000) in play,” Venier said after the show. “You can’t jerk people around. I’m calling the police.”

Quiz participants in Venier’s program, “Domenica In,” supposedly were chosen at random from the phone book.