Bob Barker

OF THE PRICE IS RIGHT

Q: What did Bob Barker do before “The Price Is Right”?

A: The magic Bob Barker brought to “The Price Is Right” was in how he interacted with the contestants. And it was his gift with audiences that got him into the TV business in the first place. He actually studied as an economist but soon moved to a job in radio. His job at KTTS in Springfield, Mo., gave him his first taste of crowd work.

“All the hosts were taking unrehearsed contestants out of the studio audience and creating spontaneous entertainment with them,” he told Emmys.com (after being inducted into the Emmys Hall of Fame). “I had never been in a school play and I had never been in front of an audience before, but I found that I thoroughly enjoyed it. My wife had heard the show and when I got home she said, ‘That’s what you should do. You do that better than you’ve done anything else.’”

That’s the sort of advice you shouldn’t ignore, and he didn’t. He soon moved with his wife to Los Angeles to do his own radio show, “The Bob Barker Show.” And when TV producer Ralph Edwards heard Barker on his car radio, he knew he’d found what he was looking for: someone to host the new, daytime version of the hit game show “Truth or Consequences.” Barker hosted that for 18 years. During the final two of those years, he moonlighted with another hosting gig, on “The Price Is Right.” And the rest is daytime TV history.

I mean that literally, by the way — across his 35-year run, Barker made history on “The Price Is Right,” setting precedents (shortly after he joined, it was expanded to become the first hour-long game show in TV history) and breaking records (in 2002, he broke Johnny Carson’s record for continuous performances on the same network television show).