Ken interviews The Price Is Right Producer Roger Dobkowitz!
WBCA Podcasts
City Talk with Ken Meyer (Roger Dobkowitz)
WBCA Radio is proud to present City Talk, where fascinating conversation is alive and well, with your host, Boston radio veteran, Ken Meyer. The first four contestants on The Price Is Right! Well sir, every show like that one needs a good producer, and we have one of the best. He was part of it for over 30 years. His name is Roger Dobkowitz, and Roger, it's a real pleasure to talk to someone who is good at what they did and one of the best at doing it. Well thank you Ken, that's a very nice thing for you to say and I appreciate it very, very much. Alright, let's go back to the beginning. What's it like for a young man who goes to college and who is in love with game shows to try and find a job? Well it was hard, my story was I went to college and I wrote a thesis on game shows, a history of game shows on prime time television, and I decided that I was going to use that for my resume. So I used to, I had to send those thesis copies of those thesis out to game show producers, and then back in the 70s, the only way you could find who produced the game show was to actually watch the credits at the end of a show. So I would sit down and watch all the game shows in the afternoon and wait for the credits to be shown, which was usually just once a week, and I would jot it down, I would write it down, and I would find out the addresses, I sent them out, I sent out about 30 thesis to various people, and believe it or not, like to my surprise, I did get a lot of responses and I was able to interview with lots of people, I interviewed with Jen Murray, I interviewed with Monty Hall, I interviewed with some other producers, and the big, the person that helped me the most was a producer called Ron Greenberg, who was doing the what, where, what, where, why game, what, where, something like that, what, where game. And Ron Greenberg got my thesis, and he was impressed by it, he passed it on to Bud Grant, who was head of CBS Daytime, who I interviewed with, and Bud Grant said, well, he said, I know of Mark Goodson's, I want you to meet with Mark Goodson, so I met, I, I don't want to make this a tremendously long story, but I'll shorten it as much as I can. I drove to New York from my interview at Mark Goodson, I met him in his office, and he turns to me, and he says, after we've talked, he says, he says, Roger, and he's this big fancy office, and, and I'm sitting there in my old sport code, he says, Roger, when are you flying back to LA? And I said, flying, I'm driving back to LA, and his eyes bugged open. He said, you're driving? You drove here? I said, yes, I drove in my VW. He said, okay, and he said, thank you very much, Roger, I left the office, I went back to my hotel, and there was a notice there for me to meet with Mark Goodson the next day. I met with him the next day, and he turns to me, and he says, Roger, anybody that had the initiatives to drive for an interview has got to have the initiatives to work on a game show. So I'm hiring you, we're starting a new show out in the West Coast, if the price is right, we'll find something for you to do on a show, I don't know what, but we'll find something for you to do. And that's how I got the job on the price is right. All right, we should tell everybody who just doesn't know that Mark Goodson was part of a great two-man production team called Goodson and Toddman, and they had a lot of successes as far as game shows were concerned at that time. Mark Goodson was the king of game shows. Mark Goodson was rich beyond belief. He had newspapers, he had real estate, he had apartment building, but his love was game shows, and he would spend all of his time in the game show factory of Mark Goodson productions, and he left at the most. I mean, he didn't have to work like he did, but he just loved it the most, and he was able with him and his team, and he had a team of people produce game show after game show after game show, and they were good game shows. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about shows like, "To tell the truth, I've got a secret. What's my line?" Just to name three shows that were great and lasted a long time. Right, right. And they were simple. The formula was simple for them all. Yeah, yes, that's a secret, a lot of people don't understand you keep game shows simple, and that's all you need, simple, entertaining games, they don't have to be complicated with a lot of wheels inside and whatever's going on, they just got to be simple and plain, and you got to do, he said his idea was, "What are we doing in our lives?" That is fun, and let's not make a game out of it. Like he said, we all think about when we go to the store, how much does that thing cost? Well, he decided to make a game out of it. Somebody has a secret. Well, we try to guess what that secret is, let's make a game out of it. That's what he would do. You would take things that we like to do in real life and then turn them into a game. We should also talk about the fact that the price is right, had been on before it came back to CBS where the gentleman who did it for 35 years, Bob Barker, but before that, it was on NBC, and it was a half-hour show, and it was hosted by Bill Cohen. Did you watch the show back then? Yes, I did, oh, yes. Every week when it was on in the evening, you would sit down as a family and watch that, and then it was also on the daytime too for a while. No, it was a big fan. I was a big fan of that show. All right, sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry. In 1972, Goodson decided to bring it back, and he did realize that the game of the '60s was a little bit too slow for the '70s, so he changed the format around a little bit, and we have the version that everybody is familiar with today. All right, can you elaborate a little bit on that, on how he determined that it was too slow and what you did to change it? Well, he himself said he pulled the tape down to look at the tapes, and basically the original show was, if you're familiar with our show, the price is right today, the '60s show was basically just the one bit, the single contestant did over and over again. You had four contestants, they were shown a prize, they would take turns bidding on it, and that was basically it. They did that five, six, seven times during the show, that's all they did, had four contestants, they would did on something wherever got closest without going over with it. So he decided to keep that element in the new show. He just thought that was like, you can't do that anymore, it's not much going on. So he decided to keep that element in the show, which was contestant Roe, where we have four contestants running down. He decided to keep that, and what he did then was pick that winner and bring it up on stage and play a separate game, three separate games for the half an hour, and he felt that would do it, and it did do it. It was the secret to bringing back that show. All right, the gentleman who hosted that show, who was the driving force, as it were, is a fellow named Bob Barker. Now before he did the prices right, he also did truth or consequences on television. Did you happen to watch that show with Barker when he did it? Yes, I did, and I remember the very, and I was a little kid, but I remember the very first show he was introduced on, believe it or not. Ralph Edwards came out and said, I have it, somebody's going to take over the show, he's a young man, he's going to really do well, I want you to all meet Bob Barker. I actually remember that show. That's amazing, because I interviewed somebody who wrote several books on old-time radio, and I said, what was the most astounding thing that you found out that you never knew before? He said, of all the people that I researched, nothing no one was as clean as Ralph Edwards. There was nothing, or nobody had anything to say bad about Ralph Edwards. But he had been in the game show business too, because he had hosted truth or consequences on radio, Barker had hosted on radio, and then did truth before he came to the prices right, so they both had a game show background. Right, Bob got prices right, this is how Bob got the prices right, Dennis, Mark Goodson was going to bring it back to the prices right, as I just said, he was going to bring it back in a new version, but he was going to bring it back in syndication, which would have been one night a week in the 730 time slot, and he signed Dennis James to do that. Dennis James was also a great host. CBS found out that Goodson was bringing back prices right, and CBS was interested in putting it on in the daytime, because they were going to put on a block of game shows, and CBS came to Mark Goodson and said, we would want to put the show on in the daytime, but we went Bob Barker to host it. And that's how Bob got the position, CBS requested him, and as Bob has said many times to me, he said, Roger, if I had known that this was dependent on me taking the show, I would have asked for more money, but because he didn't know that it was dependent upon him, but he signed, he was signed, and of course he was the best choice for the job. All right, when the show originally came back, it was 30 minutes as it was in the original format. Mark made them decide to go to an hour, and did you have any qualms about it being too long for a game show? Oh, oh, you did it. What happened was the daytime schedule, the soap operas in the daytime, were all expanding to an hour, and it helped the network quite a bit. I mean, you save a lot of money doing one hour long show, then two separate half an hour shows. So CBS thought, let's try it out. And they came to us and said, we just want to try a week of shows, hour long shows. And we did a week of hour long shows, and apparently it was extremely successful. And then they came back to us and said, we want to make it permanent. When I found out about it, I wasn't a producer yet. When I found out about it, I thought, oh, no, they're going, oh, the show is going to last very much longer. We have an hour a day, it's only going to last another year, maybe or two years. And I did have my qualms. I really did. But what happened, what it turned out, is that Bob is so good at what he does, that when it moved to an hour, Bob had so much time, extra time, to play with the contestants, to get to know them, that it just made the show so much better. And it became a big hit, being an hour long. Talk about the difference in prizes from the '60s to the '70s when Price's Right was back in one hour. Well the prizes, because they only had like six one bids or seven one bids per half an hour back in the '60s. I'm a little bit bogged in my head, but I think they were a little bit bigger prizes. I know they were, one time the old director who did that show said, we even had an airplane. We gave away a house on the original Price's Right. The new Price's Right had a very interesting model to pay for their prizes. We were going to have all of our prizes paid for by promoting them on the show, that we would plug them for six seconds, say, this is the Amanda Refrigerator, it's the best of the world, and it would go on for six seconds, seven seconds. And Amanda would give us a free refrigerator. And then we would also have, so we didn't have as many giant prizes. We had more of the middle of the road prizes, because they were all free to us, which really helped the cost of the show. And then of course we had the small items like Kiko Man soy sauce, when we plugged them they would give us $1,000 or $500. So that would go into the prize budget. So the original concept of the Price's Right was that the prizes wouldn't cost the company anything. And so that's why we didn't have airplanes and houses and giant boats and motor homes on the daytime show for a long time. One of the big things that you gave away were cars. Now I watched the last price is right, and you guys gave away three cars in a 40 minute period. Yes. We did, we did, and they were expensive. They were expensive. Now we did have a budget actually, we did have a rather than everything wasn't free. We had to buy stuff. We had, we actually see that started actually giving us money to buy prizes. And as producer of the show, for that show, I knew the last show we were going to really go all out with prizes and have a nice cars. So for a month or two before that, I started, I started cutting back on the regular prizes during the regular shows. So I had a bankroll to spin on the very last, last show, which I did. I think those three cars were big cars. Yeah. They were iron rigs and Chevy's. Yeah. One of them was a Corvette, I remember. I don't remember what the other two were. Probably one, probably we used, it was Corvette's, Cadillac's and Lincoln's. Those were the big cars that we would love to put on. Those got the biggest reactions, it wasn't the Mercedes, see, I used to argue, I used to argue with people on the set. I mean, not seriously arguing, but they said, why don't you put a Mercedes on? Why don't you put a BMW on? I said, I said, those are nice cars, those are very expensive. But the average person loves the Cadillac's and the Lincoln's. And they get the big reactions. And it is true. If you take a cross country trip, as I did many, many times crossing the country, you leave New York or you leave Los Angeles, you don't see a BMW, you don't see a Mercedes. You see Cadillac's, you see Lincoln's, you see trucks. You see all the other cars. The rest of the country doesn't care about BMWs on Mercedes. And I used to have to argue with these people in Los Angeles, you know, we put a Cadillac's. You know, I hear Mark Goodson's name a lot, but nobody ever mentions Bill Toddman. And it was a Goodson Toddman production in the beginning. Did you get to know Bill Toddman at all? Yes, Bill Toddman came down to the set several times, not very often. He was the money man. He was the guy in charge of the business side of the thing. He was not involved with the creative business. And he seemed like a very, very nice person, a very nice gentleman. But apparently he was more interested in having a nice time in life. I mean, he enjoyed his leisure, he enjoyed drinking, as I've heard. He enjoyed all those things. So he didn't get involved with the creative process, but he was a very nice, nice person. Now, a lot of the other shows, like, I got a secret, what's my line to tell the truth? They were all done live. Was price done live in the beginning? I know it was tape later, but was it ever done live? The Bob Barker version? No, it was never done live. Matter of fact, Bob and I, during the last five or six years of the show, we wanted to do the show live. We wanted to do a nighttime special live. We could have done it. Bob and I, we could have done it, but CVS just wasn't interested, but that would have been an exciting show, price is the right life, because in our show, anything can happen. And Bob knew how to handle anything. If there was a problem, if there was a game, stop picture, anything, Bob knew exactly how to handle it, it would have been a great live show. I, I want to add, now we're talking about live show. We taped our shows as if they were live, live to tape, as they call it. We would do a 60 minute show in 60 minutes. We would start, and then we would end 60 minutes later. Whatever happened during the show, happened during the show. If there was a mix up or a mistake, it went on the tape. And the director was so good at doing this, that many times at the end of the show, I would leave, I would walk down with him and I said, okay, Mark, it was Mark reslow, great director. Mark, I said, do you have to do any editing tonight? And he would turn to me and say, nope, Roger, no editing. So we did an entire show with no editing, which is unheard of today. There's nobody in this business that I think could do that, live to tape with no editing. Now, I know from reading Alex Trebek's short and poignant autobiography that when they do Jeopardy, they do more than one show, like maybe two or three shows a day, did price tight tape like one show at a time, or did you do two or three in a day? Well, at the beginning, when we went to an hour, well, we went a half an hour, we did four a day, okay. But then we went to an hour and we would do three a day. And that was a really rough schedule. I think the first show we would tape at 10, 15, and then the last show, we would tape at, I think it was 8, 15, because we had rehearsals and we had technical breaks. The cameraman's had to take lunches and dinners. It was a horrible schedule that Bob said, then he said, I don't want to do this anymore. I can't do three a day. I can do two at the most. So we switched to two a day. And then during the last maybe eight years of the show, as Bob got older, what we did was we did two shows on Monday and then only one show on Tuesday and only one show on Wednesday. So we went down to one show a day. So Bob could keep his energy levels high. When did, I mean, how much time off would you have between tapings like a week or two weeks or what? Oh, we had, the Price and Rights staff had the best schedule in the world because the show, CBS started showing reruns of the Price is Right. During the summer, they would show 12 weeks of reruns. At Christmas time, they would show two weeks of reruns. So this was our schedule and we were the envy. We were the envy of all the other markets and shows. We would take two weeks in a row, maybe three weeks in a row and then we would have a whole week off and then we would come back and take two weeks or three weeks and we would have a whole week off. And then we would have, we would have two or three weeks off at Christmas. We would always have like two or three weeks off in springtime. And then the summer, we would get six weeks off and this was all with pain. We had the best schedule ever. It sounds great. I'll tell you how good we were. I'm going to tell you how good we are. I'm very, very proud of our staff. We had 11 people on our staff, 11. We would do four shows a week, two on Monday, one Thursday, Tuesday and one on Wednesday. And we would get all that work done, taping, pre-planning, meetings, everything, and four days. So we would always have Friday off, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So we would work four days a week and have three days off. And you know, it sounds like we were lazy. We weren't lazy. We were hard workers because we loved our show and we wanted to produce the best show. But we also like to have our Fridays off. So we, we were a super, super hardworking group. Now, I worked very closely for seven years with a gentleman at WBC radio and a lot of people wondered, you know, if we spent a lot of time together and I would tell them, no, you know, when the show's over or the weekend comes, he goes his way and I go mine, we might run into each other, maybe at a restaurant or something. But we deliberately, or well, it just worked out that we didn't spend time together. Did the prices write staff do the same thing? No. Yeah. We did the same thing. We didn't, we didn't really spend time together. There was, you know, maybe two girls, they were friends, they spent a lot of time together. But most of us, there was quite a different age group. I mean, there were people my age, which I left the show in my 60s. And we had people, you know, 20 years old working on the show. And these, these 11 people, they basically left the show at the end of taping and went home and everybody did their own thing exactly like you did. Exactly. Now, I, when I watched that last show, the thing that I always will remember is that there was energy in that show right from the very beginning to the very end, where most of your shows like that, or did that just happen because it was the last show? We always had energy, but those last shows were extremely energetic. When Bob announces retirement, it came down to, when it was coming down to the last five shows or 10 shows, people started lining up outside the night before. Well, they always didn't the night before, but now they were lining up two days before. They wanted to make sure they were, they got in, they wanted to be, make sure they got in the first row. And we had lines around the block and I would, I really felt for them. I thought, god, these are wonderful people, they love the show so much that I started because I wanted them to feel good too. I actually went down, I saw these people, 200 people waiting to get in the show the next day and I would go down the line and I would, I would talk to each one. I said, thank you for coming, thank you for loving the show. And they just said, oh, we love Bob Barker, we love the show. And they were so extremely energetic and that very last show was over the top with energy. There was no other show as energetic as the one that you saw yesterday. Now, I know that on Jeopardy, at the end of the broadcast, they always talk about how you can audition online and take a Jeopardy test. And back in those days, at least in '72, computers weren't as prevalent as they are today. So what method did you use, or your staff, to pick out people that you knew would be a good contestant? And did you ever, and besides that, did you ever make any mistakes that when people got on the air, they just died or whatever? Well, the method we used was called the old feeling and the gut method. What we would do to interview people, just before the show, an hour and a half before, two hours before the show, we would interview everybody waiting in line to get into the show. I used to do it a lot. And I always loved doing it. You talk to them in groups of 10 or 20, and you say, "Where are you from? How are you? What are you doing?" And you go to the next person and say the same thing. And you sit there in your little chair, like a producer, and that's when you decide whether they're good or not good as contestants, and you have to rely on your gut feeling. Not everybody has that gut feeling, because we try down other people, because I couldn't do it all the time, and our other producer couldn't do it all the time. We try down other people, and other people just can't do it. It's a gut feeling. It's, "How do you like this person? Is this person have some kind of a secret personality or whatever?" And that's how you would call them. That's how you would call them, and these people would not know they're being called. As far as mistakes, "Oh boy, did we make mistakes." They would be so energetic outside and good outside, and they would freeze, and they would get up and stage, and after they were on stage and we went to commercial, Bob would walk over to me and say, "What the hell were you thinking when you picked that person?" And you really don't have an excuse, because if you turn to him and say, "Well, they were good outside," well, you're supposed to be able to have the talent to realize that they might be good outside, but are they going to freeze up on stage? As a contestant person, I was really supposed to guess that, know that, so I really had no excuse. I would just say, "Oh, I'm so sorry, Bob." We had a lot of duds. Then we have the jerk duds. Oh, the jerks. We hated the jerks, especially like you have a 22-year-old guy, and this happened twice, so every bid he bids is 420. I bid 420, Bob, and of course, 420 is the April the 20th. No, it's the 420 code for weed or something for a misdemeanor smoking weed, and it's a bit 420. When they first did it, I didn't even know what 420 meant, and somebody had to explain it to me. We had two contestants that did that, and these are the jerk contestants. You just want to strangle them, and we made mistakes with them. Was there someone you'll always remember as one of the best contestants you've ever had? Nobody really stands out as the best, but I do remember we had some great contestants. We had, speaking of horrible contestants, when we did a special one time in Las Vegas, and we moved the whole entire show there for one show, one primetime special, which was like Bob said, it's like the invasion of D-Day, the way we had to move everything. We had one contestant, it was a woman. I didn't pick her, but she was not one of my picks. She was the other producer's picks. She got into the showcase, and Bob said, "Okay, she was shown her prize." And Bob said, "Okay, what's your bid?" She didn't know what to say. She kept turning to the audience. She kept, Bob would say, "What's your bid?" Now Bob's doing this like it's a live show. So he says, "What's your bid? Give me your bid." I don't know, let me turn to the audience. She literally kept us going for a minute or two, and that's a long time, and it kept going on, and Bob then, he laid, I swear, he did this, he laid down his microphone and he walked off the show, and he didn't come back. And then was doing this like a live show, the cameras are still going, and he walks off the show, and we don't know, what's this? Is he serious? Did he really walk off the show? Is he really walking away? He didn't come back. He didn't come back. He's backstage. He didn't come back. Finally, the director stops tape and says, "What's going on?" And Bob was so disgusted with this contestant that he actually, he did walk out, I mean, he was going to come back, but he walked off the stage. Now if you see the show, I think this shows on YouTube. You can see the show on YouTube or wherever it might be, and you see this happen, but they had to edit it. So it looks like Bob's walking out for 20 seconds, and he's coming back, and it looks like a joke or something, but it's not a joke. He walked down in anger at what was going on with this contestant. He could not stand this contestant. So that was our worst contestant ever. Did she win anything? No, she didn't win. And as I think Bob was very glad she didn't win anything. Yeah, in fact, I remember reading about the show in Las Vegas, and Barker said he got a call at like 4.30 in the morning, and they're telling him, "We can't handle all the people that are out here at this hour, at this hour." Yes. Yes. We told them. We told the hotel. We said to them, "How are you going to handle all these contestants?" He said, "Oh, we're fine. We're fine. We're going to have them line up over there." I said, "Do you realize how many people you're going to get?" "Yeah. We'll be fine. We'll be fine." And I knew this was going to happen, the hotel just didn't believe us. And so 4.30 in the morning, we practically have a riot outside because there's more people that want to get into the show than there was room for. It was quite a scene. How far in advance did Bob announce his retirement? And did this hit you like a, if you're part of the expression, a thunderbolt? Yes. Okay. Now, he, several years before he retired, he said to me one time, he said, "Roger, I think I'm going to hang on my hat this year." I said, "Bob, you can't do that, Bob. You can't do that. Oh, no, Bob. People love you, Bob. People." He said, "No, I think I'm going to hang on my hat." And I said, and I wanted the whole thing, "Bob, no, you can't. You shouldn't do that anyway. I don't have enough saved yet for my retirement, blah, blah, blah." And he actually said, "Okay, I'll do another year." And I always thought, "Did I really make him do another year?" And so he did, after that, he did like three or four years. And then I remember the day I was sitting on my desk on October, the 31st, 2006, because it was Halloween. And he phoned me up and says, "Roger, you're the second person I've told, but I am going to retire after this year." And it hit me like a bombshell, no kidding, you're absolutely right. It was just like, I mean, I knew it was going to have to end Sunday, but I never really saw it ending. And then I had to tell the staff, and the staff was shocked. And so the whole entire year was devoted to Bob's last year, and it did hit me like a bombshell. Now, when I was a young boy, I was a big fan of the Howdy Duty Show. Howdy Duty. Yes. And since interviewed Bob Smith, and he became a friend of mine, and he said, "When they did their last show, he had a very bad golf game that day. Tell me about what it was like for you when the last show was finished." Well, when the last show was finished and Bob signed off, there was a lot of, unfortunately there was a lot of commotion, Bob did a lot of interviews. The audience took their time leaving the audience. They came up and they talked to me. And then afterwards we had a big party and some of us drank too much. And so that was the empty feeling that we had was they hadn't yet, even though Bob did his last show, they had no replacement for him, no replacement, and that was very unusual. I mean, you would think they would have had to pick a replacement, but there was no replacement. And we were sort of in the days for the next four or five weeks, because we didn't know what the future was going to hold for us. And then we found out. Boy, could I ask a lot of questions about that? Anything you want to, I'm going to be very honest. Okay. Was the new host Drew Carey the reason why you left a show that you've sat here and bragged about for 45 minutes? Yes. Yes, he left. I left because of him for two reasons. First of all, it was extremely difficult working with him. He didn't want to learn, he was kind of lazy in my estimation. And like many stars who come in and he was a star or a celebrity, they like to bring in their own people. So he wanted to bring his own people. So I was sort of glad that I was leaving it because it was forced retirement. And I was glad I left because I looked back and I thought if I stayed on for another three or four more years with Drew Carey, I think I would have died of a heart attack. So I had mixed feelings about leaving the show, the show that I loved. I just saw it come in the wrong direction, but I was sort of glad at the same time. All right, but tell me about leaving, I'm sure it was very difficult. How was the rest of the staff about the whole thing, are there any people that are still there that were there when you were? Yeah, there are a couple people still there that were there when I was there, but most of them left. After I left, I heard that the first year was hell on the show. We were under my regime and under Bob Barker's regime. We all got along, everything was peaceful. We tried to work together, we had our nice time off. And after I left the company, I'll tell you what it was. As long as Bob was there, Bob was in control of the show. I was producing it, Bob was given the title of executive producer, but he didn't do any of that kind of work. He was in charge of the show, veto power, and he would tell us to do a few things here and there. But after he left, Fremantle, which owned the show, was now able to move in and do what they wanted to do to the show. They no longer had Bob saying, "Keep your hands off our show, we're doing just fine." They started to move in and started making a lot of changes to the show. The worst change to me was they came up at one point. We were still taping at Live to Tape, which I think is so important in the game show, Live to Tape. And they came up to me during Drew Carey's regime, during Drew Carey's hosting and said to me, "Roger, we don't want to do it Live to Tape anymore. We're going to let Drew do whatever he wants to do and then we're going to edit out the stuff we don't like." I didn't like that, but it wasn't my show, it was their show, so I said, "Okay." I think that was the beginning of the downfall of the price is right when they started editing stuff out, because Drew Carey, this was my big pet peeve, I had three pet peeves about Drew Carey. One of my pet peeves was when he does a contest and when he's playing with the contest of playing the game, he doesn't rush them along. He just stands there. He says, "Okay, what number do you want?" And the contestant just sort of stands there. And he stands there. He doesn't do anything. And I went up to him one. I finally went up to him. I said, "Drew." I said, "You've got to hurry them along." I said, "Oh, it's only a 60 minute show, or it's young and the rest of us is going to start soon. They're going to come in the studio and tell us to get out. Make a joke out of it, but hurry them along." And he turns to me and he says, "Roger, I don't want to hurry them along because they might make a mistake." So now, why? So there's none of this hurting along. Now, he did not understand that every game has a time limit. Every game has a time limit. I'm not talking about price and write games. I'm talking about any game. I mean, certain games have official time limits, like if you play Boggle, the word game, you got three minutes. And you might say, "Well, checkers, I doesn't have a time limit." Checkers has a time limit. What is the time limit? It's the other players saying, "Hurry up! I don't have all day to sit here. It's your move." So every game has a time limit. Every game has another player saying, "Hurry up! That's what makes a game exciting. That's what makes put the drama in a game that you have to make a decision. You don't just stand there and take all day to make a decision. You lose all the drama of the game. He didn't understand that. Free metal didn't understand that. And this is why when you watch the show today, there's none of this excitement that used to get on the prices right with Bob Barr, who's saying, "Hurry up! What do you want?" "Oh!" "I don't know. I don't know." You don't have that anymore. That's too bad. That was a long little dissertation there. I love and admire your passion and enthusiasm for game shows, which leads me to the question of, "After you retired from the prices right, did you or have you been involved in any way in the game show industry at all?" Well I did for a while. I did. I had several games I was trying to push, especially one super game I was pushing for a long time. But the game show business has changed so much that what they want, they don't want solid games, they don't want the old school games anymore. They want a gimmicky game. They want a game that has a celebrity host and something that they can tout more than a solid, solid game. They don't want to do a live-to-tape and that's something. They also don't want to use contestants out of the audience, which was one of my shows, and because they want to pre-program all the contestants, they want to tell the contestants what to do and how to do it, and so after three or four years, I said, "You know what, I'm just going to take it easy and not stress myself out anymore," and that's what I did. You know what? They are bringing back other, and now I turned on our television the other night and watched the tail end. Here's a name of the show for you called Name That Tune. Yes. Now, I remember when it was on the air with a host named George DeWitt. In fact, I got to name that tune Game for Christmas one year, and they finally brought that show back. They bring back to tell the truth, but other shows like I got a secret and what's my line, they are not bringing back. And even when the CBF show of what's my line ended, they put it into syndication for a while, and they had a couple of different hosts and even some of the old panelists like Arlene Francis and Bennett Surf, it just wasn't the same. It was different. It didn't have the, as Gil Fates wrote in his book on What's My Line, to quote him, the "fishi quality," unquote. Right. Right. They don't understand what the essence of some of the game shows. Hash game. Hash game is a classic example. Hash game was a huge gigantic hit when it was on, and they tried to bring it back three or four or five times, and they just don't get it. They don't get it. What makes the original show work. They have a current version on now with Alec Baldwin as host, and they have a panel of so-called celebrities. And to me, the show just falls completely flat. They're trying too hard. Did you have any celebrities on the prices, right? We had, we never had celebrity contestants. We had guest appearances. We had Lucille Ball on one time touting her rerun that CBF was going to show. We had a rental show up one time just to have some fun on the stage. We had Betty White once. That's how we had celebrities. We never had a gimmick version of the price is right. When we did prime time shows, CBF said, "Well, you've got to put a gimmick." And we were forced to have a gimmick for the prime time shows like the million dollar specials or the salute to the armed forces. But during daytime, we never had to rely on a gimmick show. Once you rely on a gimmick show, it usually means you're having problem with the ratings. And gimmicks are easy to think of. gimmicks, producers think their gimmicks are so clever. No, gimmicks are easy to think of. What you've got to do is the gimmick should be you have a good show. That's what it should be. Are you ever in touch with Bob Barker since those bygone days? Oh, yes, yes, Bob and I became extremely close. I realized at one point I knew Bob, the only people I knew more than longer than Bob was my brother. I knew Bob longer than my wife, longer than my father, longer than my mother. We stayed in touch. We went down to dinner maybe twice or three times a year. And we would phone up and we would talk whatever's going on. And I was in to tell people what you see of him on TV is exactly how he was upstage. There was no two versions of Bob Barker. There was only one version of Bob Barker. Do you ever watch The Price is Right anymore? I did for the first year or so, but not anymore. I really, I know there's a strong to say, but I really just can't stand it because the contestants, now they've got rid of the audience because of the COVID thing. So they have four contestants, they have all their contestants pre-picked and they come running out from behind them, the curtain back there and they come out and they all act the same. They all do the same thing because they're told, they're told, now you run out and you come back excited and if you win, you got to do this and you got to do that and it's all edited. If they don't do it right, they do it over, they actually do it over, which is something we never did. We never, ever did anything over on our show unless it was like a camera broke down or somebody who we had to do it over, but we never did anything over. So I just see the show and Drew, I am sorry to say and I can say it because I've been in the game show business for a long, long time. Drew Carey is a horrible, in my opinion, horrible host. He just doesn't know how to host a show. Well, you were, you were a good part of, of what made the prices right successful. Because I told you off the air, my parents always had a television in the kitchen and they would always have lunch during the prices right every day with Bob Barker. So that's one of the strong memories that I have of that program. And I want to thank you for giving up your time and you have been very candid. I have looked forward to meeting with you and talking with you for a long time. I've heard you on the air many times with Morgan White, Jr., and this to me is a very special thrill to be able to sit down and talk with you. And as far as I'm concerned, if you'll pardon the pun, the pun, the price is right. Oh. Thank you. It was great. I love talking about game shows. I love talking about the price is right. So I had a wonderful time. Well, I did to you, you are, you are very forthcoming, very candid, certainly very candid. And I really appreciate you're doing this and it's been a real thrill to have you on. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Very good. Thank you. All right, sir. And that will do it for another edition of City Talk. Good night, everybody. Thanks for listening to another great conversation with Ken Meyer and friends. You can contact Ken by email. He addresses kjmyer7@gmail.com. That's kjmyer7@gmail.com. Tune in next time for more conversation with Ken Meyer on City Talk. [MUSIC PLAYING]