Browsing the Hollywood Reporter today, I read the obituary for Pip Wedge, a UK TV producer who emigrated to Canada and enjoyed a long and successful career.
What jumped out at me, as usual, was a minor detail about his earlier exploits. According to the profile, he’d “produced Double Your Money pilots in Canada and Australia”.
Double Your Money ran on UK TV between 1955 and 1968 (it also had an earlier radio incarnation). The basic mechanic? The prize money awarded for a question doubled each time.
Then as now, quiz shows being copied in different markets wasn’t at all unusual. But “pilots” were not common at that time on Australian TV, so I decided to dig deeper into what happened.
The Reporter‘s main source for that early history was an interview with Wedge that ran on Playback Online in 1994. Here’s what that profile said:
[Show host Hughie] Green asked him to help set up Double Your Money pilots in Toronto and Sydney, Australia. As part of an advance party, Wedge arranged studio space at cfto-tv in Toronto and travelled across Canada interviewing suitable contestants. He repeated the same exercise in Australia. Then, beginning in February 1964, Carnation Milk sponsored two months shooting in Toronto to complete the quiz show pilot.
Once you check the history, this turns out to be something of an over-simplification.
As far as I can ascertain, Double Your Money never ran as a standalone show in Australia under that name. But it was a featured segment in Party Time, produced in Melbourne by HSV-7 and shown in Sydney on sister station ATN-7. Its debut episode appeared in Melbourne on Sunday 5 May 1963 and in Sydney a week later on Sunday 12 May 1963. (That would have given time to send the recording from one state to the other.)
Here’s a report from the Sydney Morning Herald from 29 April 1963 about the show:
The description makes it clear this is indeed the UK format.
The correct answer is worth one penny, the second tuppence, and so on. A first-class team who answer questions quickly and correctly may build up a total of more than £100.
The 30-minute show continued with weekly broadcasts. The latest Melbourne TV listing I can find for it is Sunday 16 June 1963, which would appear to mark the end of the run. No footage of Party Time seems to be extant (no surprise for 1960s Australian TV).
This doesn’t seem to tie in very well with the timeline Wedge provided to Playback Online in 1994. As well, that report says filming happened in Sydney, but we know the 1963 Party Time was recorded in Melbourne. So what’s going on?
A report from the Sydney Morning Herald from provides the likely explanation.
It would totally make sense that producing segments for the UK Double Your Money would involve Wedge. While this Herald report emphasises the role of Stella Ashley as production manager, the travelling crew would very likely be larger.
A report in the Australian Women’s Weekly from gives more detail on what the UK show was doing:
On that schedule, Canada was the last country on the list.
All that lines up with Wedge’s general recollection that he had to help find contestants in multiple countries and ended up in Canada. But it evidently wasn’t a pilot; it was a special series of episodes for the the still-very-successful UK version of Double Your Money. So there you go. It always pays to check the details.
For more TV deep dives, check out Philip Brady’s mangled quiz show history, some excessively detailed checks on Top Of The Pops, whether Kwicky Koala is really Australian, how Aussies got to see the Star Wars Holiday Special more than any other country, literally everything we know about a long-lost Muppet special and whether Summer Bay has a railway station.
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