It seems only fitting that Chuck Barris, the wild-haired producer who gave birth to reality TV with "The Dating Game," "The Newlywed Game" and "The Gong Show," should pound the final nail into its coffin with his madcap new novel, "The Big Question."

What happens when "American Idol" turns idle, "Survivor" turns cadaveric and no one wants to kiss "The Bachelor?" Barris knows: You ratchet up the stakes.

In "The Big Question," a famous TV producer does just that when he launches a show of the same name where contestants vie for $100 million. Get the big question right and you're superrich; get it wrong and you are executed on live television.

Silliness with a social snicker has long been the signature of the 77-year-old Barris, whose career has taken a few comic twists of its own. Hired as an NBC page out of college, Barris conned his way into a management-training program. Switching networks, he was assigned by ABC to oversee standards and practices on "American Bandstand." That's right, Barris started out as Dick Clark's censor, albeit a fairly lackadaisical one.

In the mid-1960s, Barris left his position with daytime programming in Hollywood to produce a new kind of spontaneous game show he felt would appeal to a new generation of viewers. During the next five years, Barris produced a dizzying 27 half-hours of groundbreaking television each week, with two hit shows, "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game," in primetime.

In 1976 Barris went before the camera himself as the ringleader of "The Gong Show," an improvised talent contest exclusively for the talent-impaired, whose performances were ravaged by judges Rip Taylor, Jaye P. Morgan, Jamie Farr and others. It lasted two years, and four more in syndication, before an exhausted Barris pulled the plug.

In 1987 Barris sold his multimillion-dollar TV production company and moved to the French Riviera to write novels. His first attempt -- pre "Gong Show" -- titled "You and Me, Babe," had been well-received by critics and readers alike.

But he is perhaps best known for "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," his "unauthorized autobiography," in which he reveals his secret life as a CIA hit man; believe it or not, that's your call. The book was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore and George Clooney, who also directed.

Bankrate caught up with the mercurial Barris at his Manhattan apartment for his observations on the unblinking eye.

Bankrate: Judging by "The Big Question," you're still a dangerous mind, aren't you?

Chuck Barris: I guess so. I guess that's probably what I'll always be. But I really enjoyed writing that book. I was writing about something I knew about and I really loved building those characters up to do what they had to do. That was my biggest problem, trying to create characters that weren't terminally ill or old so that they could realistically go for a program like that.

Bankrate: What do you think of reality TV? You arguably started this whole thing, after all.

Barris: Well, that's what they keep saying. I really don't watch it. I never really watched game shows when I was producing them because basically they bored me and I didn't want to be influenced by them. I don't watch today's reality television at all. I did an interview with Fox and they absolutely could not believe I have never watched "American Idol," which I never have. They found that astounding. But those shows just don't appeal to me.