The Price Is Right” without Bob Barker could mean something profound to a lard-butt nation. Either he gets a life or you do. Maybe both.
Barker is 83 now. He’s essentially the longest, oldest, most continuous anything on the air. At a recent taping of the game show in the spangly-sparkly CBS studio long ago named in his honor, he is wearing one of his perfectly fitted navy suits. His face, neck and hands are layered in stage makeup the hue of pulverized Nevada, so much that you’re not sure where it ends and the man begins. His hair (hair?) is snow white; he stopped dyeing it many seasons ago in a nod to the inevitable. “What are you going to do after [you retire]?” an audience member shouts out during a commercial break.
“Well, I plan to do a little more drinking,” Barker deadpans.
– – –
Rich, what’s the next item up for bid?
“Bob, it’s this lovely floor clock!”
Wooooo, goes the audience.
Nobody wants a grandfather clock, not really. They want the grandfather figure, who keeps five $100 bills in his left coat pocket.
Next week, Barker will tape his final episode of “The Price Is Right,” turning over the hosting job, which has been his for 35 seasons since the show’s relaunch in 1972, to an as-yet-unchosen successor.
About 5.5 million viewers tune in on an average day. People wait outside for as long as 18 hours for one of 325 seats in the audience; nine of them will be picked to play. In some deviation from the science of television demographics, the most devoted fans are not merely the busloads of church-permed, AARP-age minxes, but, more intensely, legions of college kids in flip-flops.
“The Price Is Right” is relatively cheap to make. More important, it is one of the easiest, happiest things on television to watch.
Just the sound of it feels, somehow nostalgically, like being in bed with the flu. (“Come on down!” roars the announcer, Rich Fields — who replaced the late Rod Roddy in 2003, who replaced Johnny Olson in 1986 — as you beg some 7-Up and toast to stay on down.) There is the sound of it starting at 11 a.m., over those gooey-warm CBS airwaves, just when the day is still technically young and yet already somehow wasted. It feels like skipping class again and again, the MWF 10:30 section of Lit 125: The Emerging Self.
It is the sound of human, couch-bound torpor (hospital waiting rooms; snow days!) mixed gleefully with supply-side economics. (Bob Barker, it should be noted, graduated summa cum laude in economics from Drury College in Missouri, class of ’47.) You win by knowing the stuff that matters — the going price of soup, of baby wipes, of pain relief. Also there is wonder, exaltation, a new pool table, his-and-hers Jet Skis, this beautiful living room set. All this can be yours. If …
‘I look at our audience as a microcosm of what America should be,” says Roger Dobkowitz, 61, the show’s longtime producer. “Of all the reality shows out there now, we’re the most real. We enjoy our contestants being as real as they are. And what are they doing? They’re doing their best. The audience really comes together and is proud of each contestant for doing the best they can. Nobody’s trying to make somebody lose. It brings tears to my eyes to talk about it. … “When a contestant loses a game, they’re still so happy to be there. It’s like something they’ve accomplished. It becomes this badge of honor — they came to Mecca, they got up onstage, they met Bob Barker. They’re not there for greed.”
See them zealously staked out along the CBS compound. Around noon, each ticket holder is interviewed for possible contestanthood. Everyone gets that big, honey-yellow name tag with her or his name Sharpied in all caps upon it: ELISE. JACOB. RAJEAN. ANDREW. LESONYA. JOYCE. ASSAD. MELISSA.
Someone explain all the sorority girls, the Marines, the youth group missionaries, the frat rats, the stoners. (Well, the stoners we understand.)
“Think about it this way,” Dobkowitz offers. “The median age in this country is 36 or 37, which means half the country does not know life without Bob Barker. You’re young, you go out in the world and all the new things happen — jobs, marriage. But turn on the set and Bob’s doing the television show, and it’s all OK.”
People who play “The Price Is Right” look exactly like the nation itself, no matter the year. They are dressed for immediate departure on Untucked Airlines. They seem like a lot of different thesis statements at once — about diversity, about class, about consumption — on a show that never meant to suggest any of that.
Up on that stage, they get bleary-eyed and sometimes tell Barker about being sick a lot in 1st grade, or about endless days spent at Meemaw’s house watching TV, or they have him sign the tattoo they’ve gotten of his famous smiling face — Bob on the shoulder, Bob on the biceps. It puzzles him and he does not question it.
Barker’s wife, Dorothy Jo, has been dead 25 years, and he misses her greatly. They never had children. He has millions of grandchildren, though, if you broaden the definition of love and family to include being loved on television, by that sort of family. After a taping of the show earlier this year, in his dressing room, Barker considers this concept, as if it has never been suggested to him, and says yes, that’s a good point, that’s probably true.
Barker remembers the late producer Mark Goodson presenting the concept and persuading him to host. (“I think we’ll get a good run out of this,” Goodson said. “I do, too,” replied Barker, who already had a good run hosting “Truth or Consequences.”) And there the concept remained: the chunky stagflation-era typography; the low-tech lights and buzzers; the glittery sets that appear to be covered in the felty hides of genuine Muppets; that frantic theme song.
“Every time we talked about changing the show, people would scream ‘No, no,’ ” Barker says. “I sometimes ask the audience … and I don’t even get the word ‘change’ out of my mouth.”
Eighty-three and up and at ’em! A banana each morning does the trick, Barker says, and then some light weights and stretching, followed by an hour on the elliptical trainer, when he lets his beloved rabbits (Miss Honey Bunny and Mr. Rabbit) out of their room-size cage to play. After some home office work and an early, light lunch, he descends yet another day into the land of Plinko, Punch a Bunch, Lucky $even and It’s in the Bag. There is no chauffeured car; Barker drives himself.
The crew rehearses without him. Barker knows each of the 80 or so pricing games by heart and rarely, if ever, gets confused.
By 1 p.m., out on the stage, the crew practices wheeling cars and sofas and pricing games into place, while announcer Fields rehearses that distinctive script copy that will describe everything from “a new car!” to a set of roasting pans.
The crowd is ushered in, with the energy of sleepless speed addicts who just got a fresh fix. They dance goonily to a techno-beat version of the theme song. Names are called to “come on down.” Those big paneled doors upstage part — a little arthritically, as if they need to be greased or replaced — and Barker strolls purposefully out toward them, and it is bliss, and he basks in it for a professional 10 seconds and away we go, grind out another hit:
Rich, show us the first item up for bid!
It’s an above-ground pool. ELISE wins it, bidding $1,800, closest to the “actual retail price” of $2,974, goes on to play the Clock Game, and she spits out prices faster than Barker can say “higher” or “lower,” and finally Barker sits down and makes a hammy production of how old he’s gotten. “You did great,” ELISE assures him.
JACOB, a young Marine, wins a set of Igloo coolers and plays Cliff Hangers to win an IKEA kitchen. LESONYA bids $1,300 on a pool table and Hot Pockets frozen sandwiches, and the actual retail price is $1,300 exactly, so she gets $500, but sorry, LESONYA (cue the sad tuba bleat), no Pontiac Grand Prix.
KEITH, a retired military man, wins his-and-hers luggage and a Yamaha upright piano ($7,995). ANDREW, in a T-shirt on which he has painted Barker’s signature sign-off (“reminding you to have your pets spayed and neutered”), wins a curio cabinet filled with porcelain kitties ($2,280) and then wins $10,000 cash by guessing that salsa, cat litter, cold medicine and stain remover each cost less than $8. JOYCE wins an Aquabot pool cleaner, but in playing That’s Too Much, stops too early on the price of a Ford Mustang — $20,902. (JOYCE, that’s too little.)
But it’s not over.
When you don’t win, when Barker places his hand warmly near your lumbar and sort of half walks you, half pushes you off the edge of your fleeting fame, it’s still not over, because you can hang your hopes on the Showcase Showdown.
They keep the wheel backstage. During a commercial break, several stagehands drag it into place, where it sits on a red carpet.
Reach up there and give that wheel a spin and see who gets closest to a dollar without going over. See what the fates are telling you. See what Bob says. See what America is, or was. Boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop — “I’d like to say hi to my girlfriend, Kim, and Mom and Walter, and Trina” — boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop . . .
Boop .. boop . .
Boop . .
Boop . .
– – –
5.5
million(number of viewers on an average day)
325
(seats in the audience)
9
(contestants picked to play)
