The Price Is Right, Part 1

Imagine if this was your job.

When I was seven years old, my family moved from Longview, Washington, to the well of sorrows known Salem. This was a particularly difficult process for me because it isolated me from my best friend at the time: Television. Yes, from when we packed up the TV in Longview until it was unpacked in Salem, I was completely without entertainment. This was only for between 48 and 72 hours, but keep in mind that this was 1995. I had no Game Boy, I couldn’t ride a bike, and the Internet had not yet been invented. I had nothing to do but sit in a house filled with boxes while my parents unpacked, staring out the window at the children playing on the street and resenting them for not being able to show me Batman reruns.

A benevolent neighbor or perhaps my grandparents lent us a little portable television at some point during this dry spell, which I grabbed like a drowning man taking a fuzzy, low resolution life preserver. I set it up at the foot of the bed in my largely bare room, plugged it in, and fiddled with the rabbit ears. As the static waxed and waned, I could see a man’s silhouette emerging from the interference, accompanied by snatches of a catchy, upbeat theme song. At long last, I positioned the rabbit ears just so, and the picture came clearly into view.

He was an old man, even in 1995, holding an abnormally shaped microphone and standing in front of a colorful backdrop. Throngs of screaming overweight Midwesterners who had been shoehorned into a few hundred seats were hopping up and down, wearing colorful T-shirts singing this modern day messiah’s praises. He selected one lucky member from this mass of people and raised the microphone to his mouth.

“Come on down,” Bob Barker said. “And let’s play The Price Is Right!”

The only two channels the TV could pick up was some sort of Oregon-centric state capitol C-SPAN and this mysterious channel, which apparently only showed The Price Is Right. And so, for those two or three days until we unpacked our TV, all I watched was The Price Is Right.

And oh, how I hated it. I was seven years old, for Christ’s sake – I wanted talking dogs and fart jokes, not excitable retirees guessing the price of a dinette set. At the time, about the only game show I actively enjoyed was Double Dare, and as I recall the main hook there was that people would jeered and coated in slime if they answered a question wrong (a few years later, they called it college).

After that initial encounter, The Price Is Right and I didn’t have a lot of contact. As my life went on, I had a wider variety of TV channels to choose from, and I had more to do during the middle of the day when the show was usually broadcast. A couple of years ago, Bob Barker finally retired after approximately a billion years of service to the show, and was replaced by Drew Carey, which surprised me because I figured that Drew, like myself, had better things to do during the middle of the day.

At the time, I remember there being a fair amount of controversy about the change – a lot of people said that Drew Carey wasn’t as good as Bob Barker, that he didn’t do the show justice. I even took part in the Drew bashing myself, not knowing what I was talking about:

[From Writers, Episode 4:]
“Mike: Well, yeah, Truman, it’s just like what’s going on with The Price Is Right. They should’ve cancelled it when Bob Barker left. This beady eyed Drew Carey bastard thinks he can get up there with his Elvis Costello glasses and host The Price Is Right, but he’s wrong, because there’s a thing called manners, and a thing called decorum, and that’s how this show is done.

I, along with about 20 members of the Oregon Basketball Band, saw a taping of The Price Is Right on Wednesday, and all I can say is that I wholeheartedly retract any and all previous statements about Drew Carey and the show itself.

Contrary to popular belief, television is not as interesting in person as it is at home. I learned this the hard way when my parents and I saw a taping of The Late Show With David Letterman in New York a few years back – there were always several cameras blocking whatever was going on, forcing the audience to look up at the monitors instead, which begged the question of why we spent four hours waiting in line to see the taping in the first place when we could’ve just sat in our hotel room and gotten the same effect in more comfortable seats.

At the outset, I had similar expectations for The Price Is Right. We spent roughly four hours moving through a variety of less and less comfortable waiting rooms at CBS Television City along with legions of overexcited tourists. Dead eyed CBS pages guided us from one point to the next as we were screened for weapons, relieved of our cell phones (with all their potential price checking abilities), and interviewed by an energetic producer as a means to determine which of us had the right personality to be called down to play The Price Is Right.

We were among the last to be herded into the studio, which was full of cheering people dancing to YMCA by The Village People. In my experience, whenever The Village People are played, my mood tends to go south. This is primarily because I don’t like dancing, and the song YMCA sort of demands that you dance, especially when you’re in a room filled with people who are all dancing. If you’re standing there not moving your arms into the shape of the corresponding letters, everyone starts to look at you like you’re the crazy one.

“Hey! That guy isn’t dancing to this shitty, awful song! Let’s kick his ass!”

But then we were seated, the lights came up, and 90 minutes of pure joy began.

Truman Capps invites you to come back Wednesday and find out exactly how joyful it was.