Bob Barker a pioneer of videotape
Pre-recorded TV shows became godsend for airing in all time zones
NEW YORK The problem for Bob Barker wasn’t getting up early every day for his new TV gig. On the morning of Dec. 31, 1956, he had made his bow as host of NBC’s weekday game show, Truth or Consequences. And he was thrilled.
But here was the hitch: Viewers in the Eastern U.S. tuned in for his show at 11:30 a.m. It aired live — which meant each zany, stunts filled 30-minute telecast had to originate from its studio in Hollywood at what, for Barker and his fellow Californians, was a not-so-chipper three hours earlier.
“Can YOU imagine doing an audience-participation show at 8:30 in the morning?” Barker, 93, laughs, speaking by phone from his home just a few blocks from the theatre that, 60 years ago, summoned early passersby with the lure of free coffee and seeing a TV host in the flesh. (After a couple of weeks, Barker recalls, he persuaded his bosses to give him billing above “FREE COFFEE” on the marquee, which, he jokes, “was my first step to stardom.”)
Then a high-tech breakthrough came to his aid. The 33-year-old Barker, launching what would be a half-century run as a beloved star first on Truth, and through 2007 as host of The Price Is Right, would notch a huge TV milestone after only three weeks: On Jan. 22, 1957, Truth or Consequences, with Barker presiding, became the first program to be pre-recorded on videotape for subsequent airing in all time zones.
As of that show, each Truth halfhour not only could be produced a day or more before its intended airdate, but, more importantly to Barker, could be staged at a more agreeable hour of the day.
“We all rejoiced,” says Barker. “The bigger the studio audience and the wider-awake it was, the better for me!”
“No longer will Hollywood tourists be importuned to face a custard-pie routine at 8:30 a.m.,” echoed The New York Times in explaining how Barker’s show would introduce a prototype of Ampex’s amazing new quadruplex videotape machine.
This year, the television industry is observing the 60th anniversary of that radical breakthrough, which spared television shows from either going live, with resulting inconvenience and potential screw-ups, or resorting to a fuzzy kinescope (a film copy of a broadcast captured directly off the TV screen), if re-airings were required.
That first Ampex machine had the bulk of an industrial kitchen range, cost upward of US$45,000 (about $200,000 in 2016 dollars), and recorded only in monochrome. Since it was incapable of electronic editing, it required laboriously cutting and splicing the tape. The wear-and-tear of four magnetic spinning heads meant a reel of the expensive 5-cm wide tape could only be used about 40 times before it was worn out.
Despite the increasing use of pretaped shows that followed, a few naysayers still spoke out.
“I don’t believe tape will revolutionize the TV industry,” declared ABC’s chief engineer.
But history would side with Bob Barker, who resigns supreme as a pioneer of videotape. “It worked out very well, obviously,” he sums up. “Now the whole world does it.”