I’m off work this week and this afternoon I found myself at a loose end so I was looking through my Youtube recommendations. And something came up I had been meaning to look at for a long time – it’s The Price is Right.
Ah readers, but no. Not The Price Is Right that you are familiar with, the original Price is Right which eventually became The New Price is Right which is the TPiR that everyone knows. It ran variously in daytime and primetime from 1956 to 1965.
It’s fairly simple. Four contestants bid items shown to them. On their turn they must either increase their bid to be higher than the current leading bid or freeze. Sometimes there are is a minimum increment, and sometimes there are one-bids (like you get now). Whoever is nearest without going over wins the prize and occasionally a bonus prize. Sometimes these are a bit outlandish, sometimes there’s a mini-game attached. But it’s really neatly done with some neat ideas. And it all shifts along under the auspices of Bill Cullen, as someone who mainly knows him for his later work he’s really sharp here. You may find the first bonus prize in this surprising.
Doing some research it looks like $1 in 1960 is worth about $8.20 today. There’s actually quite a lot of this on Youtube – the daytime version has smaller prizes as you can probably imagine, but still.
Random thought :-
Is Think Tank getting a third series? My local Asda has decided to half the price of the quiz book from £8 to a bargain £4 which probably doesn’t bode too well…
I seem to recall a contestant appeal for a third series aired at the end of the last one, but I will admit I’ve not heard much since.
Here’s a YouTube recommendation. Would you like an overblown game show opening credits sequence? Of course you would, it’s like me saying “Would you like a chip?”. I present to you Welsh, or possibly Welsh-Iraqi, guess-which-hand-the-token-is-in short-lived S4C oddity Tipit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWD3fCq-i_g
This remains of course the folks behind Only Connect’s finest hour.
Matt Edmondson taking over from Reggie Yates on the next series of Release The Hounds apparently…
Oh that’s interesting. Also suggests a new series of Release the Hounds, so that’s nice. Expect it will be celebs again.
I was being a bit lazy, should have stated I nicked that fact from Digital Spy
http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/reality-tv/news/a832917/matt-edmondson-replaces-reggie-yates-host-release-the-hounds/
Release the Hounds: Famous and Freaked will return for five hour-long episodes as well as a two-hour-long Halloween special later in year on ITV2.
Something no-one seems to have mentioned yet. Series 2 of The Question Jury starts on July 17th at 3pm
http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/bromans-arrive-itv2
ITV 2 have announced ‘The Bromans’. Sounds like something like Gladiators, crossed with reality TV and taking the mythology seriously like Raven.
Good spot, ta. Reminds me more of Hercules, I think.
Thanks for sharing; just as interesting as you suggested. By a process of subtraction and a guess at the cost of gas back in the day, seems like the house might have been worth five or six thousand 1960 US dollars. From the context that it doesn’t include the cost of the land – and this does make me wonder what happens if the winner doesn’t own land, let alone what US taxation laws of the day on game show prizes might have been – then it’s probably a pretty fancy house.
We’ve seen much, much worse much more recently.
Just managed to get round to watching this and it is utterly fascinating viewing. You can see all the elements of modern day Price Is Right there, but the arrangement is completely different. Cheers for linking this.