Madcap Gong Show producer Chuck Barris, 87

Chuck Barris, right, the madcap producer of US TV’s Gong Show and the Dating Game, has died at the age of 87.

The game show impresario died at his home in Palisades, New York, of natural causes, his publicist Paul Shefrin said.

In addition to being a game show creator, producer and host, Barris was also was a bestselling author and had success in the music world.

He wrote the 1962 hit record Palisades Park, which was recorded by Freddy Cannon.

The Dating Game, which was hosted by Jim Lange, involved a young woman questioning three men, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date.

Sometimes the process was switched, with a man questioning three women, but in all cases the questions were designed by the show’s writers to elicit sexy answers.

Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and a pre-Charlie’s Angels Farrah Fawcett, introduced as “an accomplished artist and sculptress” with a dream to open her own gallery.

After the show became a hit on both daytime and evening TV, the Barris machine accelerated.

New shows included the Newlywed Game, the Parent Game, the Family Game and even the Game Game.

At one point Barris was supplying the television networks with 27 hours of entertainment a week, mostly in five-days-a-week daytime game shows.

The grinning, curly-haired Barris became a familiar face as creator and host of the Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980.

The programme featured performers who had peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all.

When the latter appeared on the show, Barris would strike an oversize gong, and the victims would be mercilessly berated by the manic Barris, with a hat often yanked down over his eyes and ears, and a crew of second-tier celebrities.

As the Gong Show and Barris’s other series were slipping, he sold his company in 1980 and decided to go into films.

He directed and starred in the Gong Show Movie which was a flop that stayed in cinemas only a week.

Afterwards, a distraught Barris checked into a New York hotel and wrote his autobiography, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, in two months.

The book – and the 2002 film based on it, directed by George Clooney – were widely dismissed by disbelievers who said Barris allowed his imagination to run wild when he claimed to have been a CIA assassin.