Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [10]
He says, “Yes, I know who you are.”
And then I tell him what fun the stunt has been, and how we have a great prize for him. I tell him we have a fancy new billiards table for him.
He looks right at me and says, “What the [bleep] am I going to do with that?”
It was the perfect end to the bleep consequence.
On another show we invited a bunch of kids who played in Little League baseball to be in the audience. They were all nine- or ten-year-old boys. Then we got two girls; maybe they were fourteen or fifteen. One girl was a professional softball pitcher. She could throw a softball like lightning. And the other girl, her sister, who was also a professional, was her catcher. We planted these girls in the audience, but not together, and pretended to the boys that we just picked them out randomly from the audience. I said something like “How about you, young lady, would you like to play? Yes? Come on.” I picked a few of the boys from the Little League group and said, “Let’s have a game.”
I told them: “We’re going to play softball. You three guys are going to hit, and you, young lady, you be the catcher. And you, would you be the pitcher, please?”
She goes all the way across the stage. And the boys are licking their chops, saying, “Oh, this is going to be fun.” I put a particularly eager young fellow up to hit, and this professional pitcher throws that ball so fast past him, he doesn’t twitch a muscle.
“Why didn’t you swing at it?” I asked.
He says, “That’s a phony ball.”
The audience roared with laughter.
“That’s not a phony ball,” I said, and I took it from the catcher. “Look at this, that’s not a phony ball.”
“Well then, she’s got a phony arm,” he said, and the audience howled even louder.
• • •
Things didn’t always go as planned on Truth or Consequences. That was part of the fun of the show. We had all kinds of things go wrong, but I just made the best of it, and the show rolled on. We had props that didn’t work. We had camera or microphone malfunctions. Sometimes a guest would react unexpectedly. But even when acts didn’t come off smoothly, there was always humor in them, and the audience seemed to love it. We’d have things that would fail miserably, but when they did, frequently I could make it amusing. Besides, people loved to see me standing there with egg on my face.
• • •
There were so many details involved with reunions that they occasionally went awry. For one, we had a deserving young marine flown home from Korea to surprise his wife. One of his wife’s friends arranged to have her sitting on a bench in front of our studio at Sunset and Vine, and on cue from us, a city bus (which we rented for the day) was supposed to pull up in front of the bench and the marine was going to step off the bus and take his wife into his arms.
I described exactly what we had planned to our studio audience and viewers. I emphasized what a fine record the marine had and how courageous the young wife had been during the months that she and the children had anxiously awaited his return. I built to the boiling point the anticipation for that glorious moment when husband and wife would be reunited. And then I went into a commercial.
After the commercial, I did a quick review to make sure that every viewer realized how fortunate he or she was to share this moment with this loving husband and wife. Then, at the exact time, to the second, that we had agreed for the bus to arrive on the scene, I cut to our outside camera.
The marine and his wife were sitting on the bus stop bench chatting. The bus had arrived during the commercial. I looked into the camera and said, “It must have been a great reunion. I wish we could have seen it.”
Some time later, after many flawless successes, another reunion went sour. This one was to be more dramatic than even the soap opera fare. This time we were reuniting a fine young sailor and his dear old mother.
The sailor’s sister brought their mother to the NBC studio in Burbank.