Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [12]
I was delighted to have Ralph’s son, Gary Edwards, who was a little boy when I went to work for his father, in the front row five decades later, cheering me on as I taped my last The Price Is Right on June 6, 2007.
2
I Go to Work for Mark Goodson, Too
If the 1950s were the golden age of television, then the 1970s were the silver age, because that’s when we relaunched The Price Is Right daytime television show, which became a huge success that exceeded all of our expectations. The Price Is Right had been a successful television show for years before I ever became involved with it, but it had been off the air for eight years. We believed we were going to have a successful show, but no one could have predicted that I would go on to host the show for thirty-five years and that the program would become a landmark ratings star and an institution of daytime television history. Unless your hair is becoming gray and you have discovered a few wrinkles, The Price Is Right is probably the show for which you remember me. From the very beginning, I loved it and never stopped loving it.
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To put the show in historical perspective, we need to go back to 1971. I had been doing Truth or Consequences on television since 1956. That’s fifteen years of hosting a national audience participation show. Before that, I had done live radio shows for six years with similar spontaneous entertainment formats. That is what I did. That is what I always did. Even before the Edison shows, I did shows from grocery stores, drugstores, theaters, and parks. I did man-on-the-street shows, and I did shows from department stores and hardware stores. I was always improvising, making conversation, and creating spontaneous entertainment with unrehearsed people. I didn’t act. I didn’t sing. I didn’t dance. I didn’t tell jokes. But I was experienced at audience participation. Some people like playing the saxophone. I liked doing audience participation shows.
When I started in this business, many of the great hosts were doing audience participation shows. Art Linkletter had his shows. Ralph Edwards was brilliant on his. Jack Bailey of Queen for a Day was another great one. I got my first radio show in Missouri when I was twenty-one years old, and it was the same kind of show I would go on doing until I retired at eighty-four. I enjoyed it when I was young, and I enjoyed it just as much when I became not so young.
Mark Goodson, one of the all-time great game show minds, had created The Price Is Right and put it on NBC back in 1956. The original host was Bill Cullen, and the show ran on NBC until 1963. ABC actually picked up the program briefly, but Price went off the air in 1965. Mark Goodson had a great talent for games and television. He was what is called a game show packager. A game show packager assembles all of the elements of the show—the idea for the show, host, cast, producer, director, staff—and, probably the most important of all, he sells the show to a network or in syndication. He puts the whole package together.
Mark Goodson and Ralph Edwards were two of the best in the business. Goodson also developed What’s My Line?, To Tell the Truth, and I’ve Got a Secret. He had great instincts. Both of them were savvy professionals.
Game shows take a lot of time to develop—tinkering with ideas, coming up with the right format, and just the right combination of chance, entertainment, and novelty. And when the shows are a success, they can be extremely lucrative. By their very nature, game shows are a huge profit center for the networks. They are relatively inexpensive to produce, and they can bring in substantial advertising revenue. For decades, daytime game show profits helped to fund the networks