Just returned from a commercial break, Bob Barker leaned slightly forward and looked over Contestant’s Row. His curiosity piqued by the middle-aged woman on the end, he took several precious on-air seconds to banter with her before calling for the next item up for bid. The lanky game show host asked about her personalized T-shirt that proclaimed “I lost 35 pounds watching The Price is Right.”
She explained that she had spent several months riding a stationery bike (or was it walking on a treadmill?) while watching the show each morning. The hour-long exercise routine conducted the five days a week that The Price is Right aired on CBS helped shrink her waistline, and no doubt the T-shirt helped impress the producers that she should be one of the nine unsuspecting audience members to be called to “Come on down!”
I watched this particular episode in the early 2000s and chuckled at the homemade T-shirt craze that had started with college kids wearing their school colors while filling the seats of the 300-person Studio 33, and had clearly spilled over to housewives and retirees. Well, I thought, at least this trend of fully covering their midriff would prevent a repeat of the most famous pre-Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction ever caught on tape.
My love for The Price is Right began in the mid-1970s when my best friend and I would gather on summer mornings to watch the silly, unpredictable joy of contestants playing for new cars and trips to the Bahamas and living room furniture. Not surprisingly, the love coincided with my dad leaving San Diego to work at CBS Television City as the operator of Camera 3 for the beloved game show.
The ’70s was also the era of the tube top, worn by woman of all breast sizes with no support other than the cotton-covered elastic tube slipped over the head and down the torso. Some of the women who filled the studio in those days, hoping to be called to play a pricing game, did not shy away from wearing the scant tops. When one such woman heard her name, she came bounding down the sloped aisle and her tube lost all ability to hold its contents.
My dad, meanwhile, was swinging his camera from corner to corner of the bank of seats, looking for the woman. This shot of finding the audience member was his for each contestant called in each episode of the more than three decades that he worked as cameraman. Although in the current era of not-so-real reality TV it’d be easy to believe otherwise, there was nothing staged about that moment when the announcer screamed “Come on down, you’re the next contestant on The Price is Right!” No one on the production team knew where those people were sitting or how they would react. Camera 3 found her a split second before the top tumbled and in true Hollywood style, when asked to reminisce about his days at Television City, my dad says, “Her top came down and I zoomed in!”
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