Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [23]
When sanity was finally restored sufficiently for me to be heard, I said, “I have no more questions.”
• • •
People often ask me how contestants have changed over the years. They have changed tremendously in appearance. By that, I mean years ago, most of the people in an audience would be reasonably well dressed. They were going to a television show, and they wanted to look nice. I’m thinking now mainly of Truth or Consequences. But even on Price, I had contestants wearing a suit or a sports coat. I had many well-dressed ladies and gentlemen in nice sweaters or shirts. Later on, I still had some well-dressed people, but I also began to see casually dressed people. I’d have people in shorts and a T-shirt or sandals and no socks. There were people in jeans and tank tops.
Then, of course, we had the long hair during the hippie period. There were times I would point over to someone in the audience and say, “What about this girl?”
And a man would stand up, with his long hair, and say, “What do you mean, girl?”
And, of course, in the last few years of Price, I had contestants with pierced noses and ears, even pierced tongues. When I first started on T or C, there probably wasn’t a pierced tongue in the entire country.
So audiences and contestants definitely changed in that respect, but I don’t find that they have changed a great deal so far as having an interesting or amusing conversation with them. I worked with audiences in the 1950s on T or C, and I worked with them in 2007 on Price, and I was able to create a fun atmosphere in the same way I did all those decades before. We always had a cross section of all kinds of people on the show, so our appeal was wholesome but widespread. Our audiences and contestants reflected that throughout the years. I think it’s a tribute to people and their basic good taste.
• • •
Price was always the more consistent show. We had the games in place, the basic structure was constant, and the audience knew what to expect. We didn’t get stagnant, though. We were always fine-tuning, adding new and different games to the mix. But Truth, by its very nature, was more of a freewheeling, unpredictable show, and things could go wrong more often. For example, one year we had a national contest involving college football. In those days, the big year-end games were the Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl. The contest was to pick the winners and the scores of those four games. The person who came nearest to the right winners and scores would win $10,000. This was a lot of money in those days, and we were live.
People sent in their predictions, and we went through all the entries to find the winner after the games. The day arrived when it was time to pay off, and our producer was ill, so Bill Burch, who was the head writer, had the job of tallying the final entries and picking the winner. Don’t ask me how it all happened—it was so many years ago—but he had only a short time to name the winner from the final entries. He came in and gave me the name of the winner. I called the winner at home and congratulated him or her and said, “Your $10,000 check will be on the way.” It was a big prize and a big deal, and everybody in the audience was cheering and celebrating when I spoke with the winner on the phone. Then I came off the stage, and Burch was sitting there with his head in his hands, and I said, “What’s the matter?”
“I gave you the wrong name,” he admitted. He got mixed up trying to figure it out at the last moment and gave me the wrong name.
Now we had a staff meeting. What were we going to do?
Someone suggested, “Why don’t you, Bob, call the person we gave it to by mistake and tell him you’re sorry there was a mistake made and he won’t get $10,000, but we’ll send him a refrigerator.”
“Bob’s not going to do that,” I said. “Bob gives people prizes. Bob doesn’t take prizes back.”
But Ralph Edwards saved the day in his own way. He said, “We’ll give the mistake winner $10,000, and we’ll give