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Jack Bailey, a sort of Carl Denham type, hosted this show in which four women sitting on a panel (the potential Queens) vied for unknown prizes by telling the sob stories of their lives in turn -- with as much sensation, pathos and outright bawling as each could muster, since the most effective story, or storyteller, won the prizes.If this sounds to you like a pandering premise for a TV reality show, I couldn't disagree.The winning woman was chosen by a crude decibel-reading "Applause Meter," and the Queen of each episode was crowned with as much blubbering as one might expect for a Miss America winner. At the climax, the ostensibly life-changing prizes were revealed to the winner. The prizes fell far short of what we see on eerily similar shows today like Extreme Home Edition -- in fact, each day's Queen for a Day typically got what might pass for one prize in a preliminary round on "The Price Is Right" these days -- but often these were appliances to ease 1950s women's work, like a refrigerator or washer/dryer set. Rather than hilarious, as I remember it, this show should seem shameful today because of its crude and early-TV sensationalist exploitation of people's every-day tragedies, not to mention some of the contestants' willingness to do anything for a buck, and the naked greed of the sponsors. Then there's the high probability that the new frig or washer/dryer set could hardly fix all that was wrong with the life of each winning "Queen for a Day." Still, its viewers found this show fascinating (like a car crash?) and often a tear-jerker as well.
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