Some games involve thrones, real or imagined

If only I had been a contestant, some recent dead-air segments on Jeopardy! would have been filled with the correct responses of "Who is William Randolph Hearst?" and "What is a Hudson Hornet?" and "Who is Cab Calloway?" and "Who is Bob Hope?" but as some grammar-challenged wag once opined, "Them's the breaks".

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed two things. First, all of the answers the real contestants couldn't supply are decidedly mid-twentieth-century (an era with which, having lived through, I am personally acquainted). Second, I ended the first paragraph using U.K.-style punctuation, not U.S.-style puntuation (that is, the period is placed outside, not inside, the quotation mark (known as inverted commas in the U.K.).

Tonight is the long-awaited and much-anticipated debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, a first in American history, although, speaking of the mid-twentieth-century, 1968 saw a debate between Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and former Vice-President Richard Nixon. A major difference is that the 1968 participants were the nominees of thir parties but the 2024 participants are only the presumed nominees, their respective parties having not yet held their nominating conventions.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find out whether William, Prince of Wales, is King Charles III's heir-presumptive or heir-apparent, or both, and report your findings in a comment. Be sure to cite your sources, because some sources give you extra points and others cause points to be deducted. Your correspondent will decide which are which.