Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [19]
Really beautiful women are seldom good contestants. They may be all right, but sometimes I think maybe their beauty has been so prominent that they haven’t had to be amusing or interesting vocally. But when you do get a beautiful woman who is funny, too, then you have a winner—a superior contestant. For the most part, I like contestants thirty to fifty years old rather than really young. Perhaps the young ones have not seen enough of life, but often they are a little wary of a situation like being on television. But take a woman of thirty-five or forty, on the other hand, she’s lived long enough to know that she’s going to survive this, and let’s just have some fun.
We also have had handicapped contestants on The Price Is Right. If a person in a wheelchair was called to come on down, a page was prepared to roll them down to Contestants’ Row, and then if they won, I’d say, “You win. Come on up here onstage.” Then the page would start wheeling him or her toward the stage. At this point, we would stop tape. In a matter of only a few minutes, the contestant would be prepared to roll onstage. We would start tape and I would say, “Here comes Harry or Margaret to play our next game.” If someone had potential as a contestant, being handicapped did not prevent them from being on The Price Is Right.
When people came to Price, they wanted to participate. They wanted to be contestants. One day there was a lady in the audience who was very pregnant. During a commercial, she gave every indication that she was about to deliver her baby. I asked the pages to help her out, and she said, “I don’t want to go. You might call my name.” I said, “Madam, we’re not going to call any names until you’re on your way to the hospital.” Fortunately, they got her to the hospital in time for the big event, but she represented people’s desire to be on Price better than anyone else I ever met.
The Price Is Right was so popular that after three years, Bud Grant, the network head of programming, decided he wanted to make the show an hour instead of half an hour. This was revolutionary. Nobody had been successful with an hour-long game show. It was a bold and audacious idea. He went to Mark Goodson and said, “Do you think you can do this for an hour?”
Mark assured Bud that we could do it. We began playing six games instead of three, and it was then that we added what was to become the famous Big Wheel to the show.
Our format became three games, the wheel, three more games, the second wheel, and the showcase at the end of the show. Not only were we the first game show to succeed as an hour-long show, but our show thrived. In fact, Price was even better in the hour-long format than it had been as a half-hour show—because it gave me more time to have fun with the contestants and the audience. Following on the heels of our success, other game shows tried the hour-long format, but all of them struck out.
We had a solid structure and format in place, seasoned people involved in the production of the show, and audience popularity that was unprecedented. We knew we were onto something, but we had no idea that it would last as long as it did. That surprised all of us—but it was a wonderful surprise.
I eventually became involved in the production of the show as well. Frank Wayne was executive producer for eighteen years before I took over. Frank was ill for most of a year, and during that year, Roger Dobkowitz and Phil Rossi, our producers, came to ask me for advice in making decisions. After Frank died, I told Mark Goodson that things were going very well and that I would like to become executive producer and continue as we were. Mark said, “Bob, let’s do it,” and do it we did, for thirty-five years.
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As I look back now on that incredible thirty-five-year run, I have many happy memories. I loved the whole The Price