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 Said It....But Did I Really Mean It? Last week, the 86-year-old legend of The Price Is Right had a few words about his successor Drew Carey to TMZ. In an interview with the online tabloid/television series, Barker suggested Carey was boring on the air----nothing contrary to what assorted observers have said who have watched the show for the last three years. One of Barker’s most incisive remarks: “I tried to make the show really exciting.....and he doesn’t do that. He just plays the games.” Later in the day, Barker became Mr. P.R. again, saying all the right things. He told Entertainment Weekly: “I would not criticize Drew Carey. I would not criticize this show.....to think that I would say anything derogatory about (Carey) is idiocy.” Barker also said, with a laugh, “I’ll keep my mouth shut in the future when I’m facing reporters.” So what transformed Barker’s refreshing honesty into the vanilla prepared statement-style quote in only a matter of hours? Let me explain to you how this works. The elimination of Rich Fields as announcer of The Price Is Right for season 39 virtually eliminates the last of the visible or major behind-the-scenes vestiges remaining from the Barker years. Oh a number of the games are the same but the flavor and texture are different. A combination of CBS, FremantleMedia and largely Carey are attempting to segue Price into a daily version of Sabado Gigante. The three-year transformation is almost done. The Price Is Right is now effectively Drew Carey’s show and is his to sink or swim on his own. Unfortunately for him, because The Price Is Right did not go away after Barker’s retirement and return two or three years later re-formatted and refurbished. So, the inevitable comparisons between Drew and Barker will continue for at least another decade, if Price were to continue so long. In this case, with a new flurry of behind-the-scenes mutterings surfacing concerning Price, the battle between syndicated magazine shows to be the first to advance a story of any kind is enormous. You have everyone from TMZ to Access Hollywood to Inside Edition to the granddaddy Entertainment Tonight grappling for a tithe of viewer attention. What most likely happened here: Barker responds to TMZ in a moment of rare candor by a retired legend about his successor. Once that hits the air and the wires, that leads to a barrage of followup calls by competing media. Regardless of what side of the fence you are on about the last 15 years of his career, Barker has had a history of shooting from the hip on subjects ranging from furs to the state of television. Further, Barker still enjoys the spotlight. I even hear him periodically on an evening show on Fox Sports Radio with phone interviews from his home. Based on that, the followup media all converged, hoping for their slice of red meat from Barker. When he offered the rather pointed remark about Drew’s performance, that was probably the way he really feels, though he had never expressed that publicly. In this case, Barker had a momentary lapse. He was awarded a small equity interest in The Price Is Right in the years after he became executive producer. To trash the show or the current host, is not in his best financial interest. Based on what typically happens, here is the likeliest of scenarios: no doubt, someone from CBS or Fremantle quickly touched base via phone with either Barker or his long-time publicist Henri Bollinger (or whomever is handling that for Barker now) and said something to the effect of, “What’s going on here?” Bollinger prepared Barker for a coming onslaught of additional media and drafted a limited number of talking points for Bob to “say the right things.” Right things = Drew is really a good guy. I misspoke. The Price Is Right was wonderful to me for 36 years and I would never do anything to hurt the show. All of it right out of a p.r. template. Was the damage done? Possibly. After all, Barker never said in his follow-ups that he thought Carey was doing a good job as host. He just said he should not have said anything publicly negative. Understand, most of the attention to this was probably paid by celebrity journalism junkies and game show hardcores who follow websites like this one and everything that has Price Is Right written on it. The vast majority of America probably ignored it. At least Barker did not do what so many athletes have done in recent years: either deny his original quote, claim he was misquoted----even when the interview was done on tape (Terrell Owens has pulled that one at least a half-dozen times)---or that the quote was taken out of context. Barker just did a p.r. mea culpa. Cutting to the chase, he just admitted he shouldn’t have said what he did. He may well have meant it but, upon further review, he realized he should not have said it. Such is an odyssey of a few hours in today’s celebrity media.  1911-2010 Headlining a special hour on Ford Startime, Sing Along with Mitch became NBC's answer to The Lawrence Welk Show. Its creator almost lived for a full century. The leader of the Singalong Gang, Mitch Miller, died Saturday in New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital after a brief illness. He was 99. Miller's signature may have been his four years at the helm of Sing Along but he carved his career as a producer and executive for Mercury Records and Columbia Records before moving into the video medium. Miller was also a periodic favorite on Goodson-Todman game shows. Born July 4, 1911, in Rochester, N.Y., Miller became a symphony oboist at the age of 15. Nine years later, he was hired as lead oboist for the CBS Symphony Orchestra. He kept the job for 12 years before moving into the business side of the recording industry. Miller recruited and developed some of the top singers of the 1940s and '50s, though his standards and occasional affinity for novelty songs led to more than a few legendary conflicts with his stars. In 1947, Mercury hired Miller to supervise classical recordings but Mitch soon began experimenting with audio techniques and musical gimmickry. He pioneered in echo (or "reverb") tones for soloists, particularly on romantic ballads. He also was one of the earliest innovators of overdub, in which singers recorded multiple parts in their own voices on separate tracks. Patti Page's "Mockingbird Hill" and a lesser hit, "Money, Marbles and Chalk" featured The Singing Rage in multitrack formats. At Mercury, Miller developed Page, Frankie Laine and Vic Damone. He spirited away all three when he moved to Columbia in 1950. His other major stars included Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, Jo Stafford, Jerry Vale, Johnny Mathis and The Four Lads. Miller eschewed the exploding rock-and-roll genre in the mid-1950s. Over one three-year period, Miller supervised more than 50 top ten hits on the Billboard charts. Miller had no aspirations to become a television performer. However, his first serious brush with the industry came in November 1954. CBS's Studio One was featuring a live drama centered around corruption in the music industry. Miller was approached to provide a song which could serve as a framework for the play's theme. He suggested a tune not previously identified with the public. Actress-singer Joan Weber belted "Let Me Go, Lover" on the program. Miller proved to be a shrewd marketer. He saw to it that top music stores across the country were stocked with the record version the morning of the broadcast. Within two weeks, 100,000 copies had sold. By January, Weber's version vaulted to number one on the charts. "Let Me Go, Lover" was eventually covered by more than a dozen artists, most successfully by Teresa Brewer and Patti Page. A country version was a hit for Johnny Cash's future wife June Carter. Lucille Ball even released a single of "Let Me Go" in 1955 that did not chart. In 1955, Miller tried his hand with a male chorus that focused on unison performance. "The Yellow Rose of Texas" vaulted to number one for the group still not known as the Singalong Gang. In 1958, the group recorded "The Children's Marching Song," which was a signature of Ingrid Berman's movie "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness." Children across America were singing along with Mitch and his gang: "This old man.....he played one....he played knick-knack on my thumb with a knick-knack paddywhack, give a dog a bone.......this old man came rollin' home." The same year, the first in a series of "Sing Along with Mitch" albums were recorded that ultimately sold 22 million copies. The records' primary selling point was a set of detachable lyrics to all of the songs on each album. "Christmas Sing Along with Mitch" was one of the biggest sellers in Columbia Records history. By 1960, ABC's The Lawrence Welk Show had become an invincible Saturday night standard, claiming nearly a score of ratings opponent victims in its wake. CBS had unsuccessfully tried to copy the Welk format with bandleaders Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Vincent Lopez, Spike Jones and even the Glenn Miller orchestra with Ray McKinley directing. NBC struck out with at least three Welk-styled hours.  Scheduled as a lead-out special after Ernie Ford's popular half-hour May 24, 1960, NBC's Sing Along with Mitch ran dead even with ABC's blockbuster hit The Untouchables and increased its audience in the second half-hour. The format was as simple as any in television; if anything, even simpler than Welk's. The accordion-driven orchestra accompanied the mostly over-fortyish Singalong Gang in a series of old standards such as "The Strawberry Blonde," "In the Good Ol' Summertime" and "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" On many of the songs, the lyrics were superimposed onscreen to give viewers an opportunity to sing along, though media accounts in some of the Miller obits erroneously reported the words featured a bouncing ball in tempo with the singers. That technique was never used on Sing Along.NBC seriously considered bumping an already-announced fall 1960 hour in favor of the Miller gang but held off until midseason 1961. One week after John F. Kennedy's inauguration and Jackie Gleason's infamous debut of You're in the Picture, NBC premiered Sing Along with Mitch as a weekly series Fridays at 9 as a replacement for its venerable Bell Telephone Hour. While Gleason garnered headlines with his now-legendary live half-hour apology for the previous week's Picture, Sing Along with Mitch debuted with a rating 38 percent higher than Gleason's and finished a strong second to ABC's megahit 77 Sunset Strip. By late April, Mitch and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.'s quartet of detectives were neck and neck. In addition to his male chorus, which largely resembled uncles who show up for a family reunion, Miller recruited a family of soloists who resembled some of the Welk crowd. Leslie Uggams, who went onto her own unsuccessful CBS variety hour in the fall of 1969, was hired by Miller after her singing exposure on Name That Tune in the late 1950s. Diana Trask was a rising young Australian singer. Sandy Stewart had some limited rock-and-roll roots, appearing as Jimmy Clanton's girlfriend in the lame 1959 film "Go, Johnny, Go!," but her style was more in tune with the performers of Your Hit Parade. Bob McGrath was the young lead male soloist, building a foundation for his long association with Sesame Street in the following decade. Miller, himself, had a distinctive flair of conducting the tunes for the viewer singalongs. Sandwiched at center stage between his group in the bleachers, Mitch led with the back of his hands facing the camera, waist-high in a horizontal direction with thumbs up. He gleefully raised and lowered his hands consistently at the same height with no punctuation for high notes or volume. Years later as a guest on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow, Snyder asked Miller: "C'mon, now, Mitch, nobody leads a chorus or an orchestra like that, do they?" Laughing uproariously, Miller said, "Oh no!" Another note of distinction was Sing Along with Mitch was taped without a live audience. Fred Waring's 1950s Sunday night series for CBS was done live with no audience. Miller told TV Guide he hated canned applause and felt the show had a better flow (and allowed for a more leisurely taping schedule) without the intrusion of audience reactions. Taking a major risk, NBC moved Sing Along for the 1961-62 season to what many analysts believed was a killer slot, Thursdays at 10 directly opposite The Untouchables. Within six weeks, the gang tied Eliot Ness. By season's end the audience preferences turned decidedly toward Miller. Sing Along with Mitch finished 15th in the Nielsens for the season. ABC sent The Untouchables packing for Tuesday nights for a final season. NBC executives began to demonstrate an itchy finger that prematurely did in a few of its other successes later in the decade----moving Sing Along with Mitch to a new time slot in each of its four seasons. For 1962-63, Mitch was sent to Fridays at 8:30 to again take on CBS's Route 66 and ABC's The Flintstones. While still holding onto a loyal, if significantly older, audience, Sing Along fell to 38th place in the Nielsens and dropped back to a close second to Route 66. For 1963-64, Mitch was off and moving again, this time to Mondays at 10 opposite CBS's innovative but unsuccessful drama East Side, West Side and ABC's new drama Breaking Point. Most weeks, Sing Along with Mitch won the time slot (and in some markets, CBS affiliates defected from George C. Scott and Ruby Dee to pick up the Singalongers). However, NBC, concerned about the aging of Mitch's audience, delayed a decision on a renewal for a fifth season.  ABC, which coveted the show, was even announced in TV Guide as picking up Sing Along with Mitch for 1964-65 as the Saturday night lead-in for Welk. The deal was considered done until ABC told Miller it could not afford to produce the show weekly in color as had been the case during all four years on NBC. Mitch rejected the move on the grounds that a switch to black-and-white would be perceived as a step backward by his fans. Miller, not convinced he was out of the running at the Peacock Network, was told his Monday night slot was down to his show and one other.In a pointed profile in a fall 1965 profile in TV Guide, Miller lit into NBC. "They told me they appreciated all we had done for NBC but they wanted to go with something new, fresh, and different instead of us," Miller said. "So what do they end up putting in as our replacement? Alfred Hitchcock! Now what is new, fresh and different about Alfred Hitchcock?" Indeed, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which moved from CBS, was canceled by NBC after its tenth and final season. In somewhat of a consolation crumb, NBC aired repeats of Sing Along with Mitch during the summer of 1966. During his years as a musical standby for NBC and before, he was popular as a player on another network. In 1958, he was a central figure on a game of To Tell the Truth on CBS. The following year, he returned on the panel. In 1961 and 1963, Miller was a mystery guest on What's My Line? and received a generous plug for Sing Along with Mitch by host John Daly both times. Miller also played nighttime Password three times, including a spirited 1962 half-hour against Carol Burnett and in later years against Lena Horne and Carol Channing. Mitch never did an NBC game show, though he appeared in a walk-on in 1961 on Concentration to plug the Thanksgiving night edition of Sing Along with Mitch. Miller focused largely on concert appearances and serving as a guest conductor of symphony orchestras after the series ended. He returned in 1969 as a guest on The Leslie Uggams Show on CBS, a Sunday night variety hour that was mauled in the Nielsens opposite Bonanza and died in 13 weeks. In 1981, in the twilight of former programming genius Fred Silverman's beleaguered tenure as president of NBC, the network was turning in desperation to one-shot revivals of its past hits. Ralph Edwards produced a two-hour This Is Your Life revival/retrospective with David Frost as host. Johnny Carson, Bob Hope and George Burns teamed to host a nostalgic series of clips of Jack Benny's NBC specials. Twenty years after their weekly series began, Mitch and the Sing Along gang led viewers in an hour of old favorites on a Saturday night. McGrath, Uggams and Stewart were back. Miller's hope against hope was that the country's turn toward conservatism might open the door to a return for Sing Along with Mitch. Yet, America had experienced the British Invasion in music, garage bands and disco since Mitch and the boys were selling their albums with the lyrics attached. The NBC special was a nice visit to the past but seemed hopelessly out of date. Sing Along with Mitch finished 79th in the weekly Nielsens. Uggams, whose hiring as an African American singer was a touchy point in some circles in 1961 (but only two affiliates refused to carry Sing Along with Mitch in its first season), summed up her praise for Miller in an interview with The New York Times: "We're talking about an era where most of the (record executives) had been musicians themselves, so he had an incredible ear for the least note that was wrong: he could hear it. Mitch and I were always on the same page." So were television viewers during that awkward four-year period of the early to mid-sixties that spanned a Presidential assassination, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and a transition between Elvis and The Beatles. Mitch Miller gave the parents and grandparents of baby boomers something that belonged to them for one hour every week. He ended every show with himself in silhouette behind the credits leading that lilting theme song. For those of the age who remember, here's one last sing along opportunity: Let me hear a melody I love to sing along, TheGameShowFix.com is a non-incorporated news website. The material used is the creation of the webmaster, unless otherwise noted. Use of stillframes from broadcasts is part of fair use news arrangements. Any reproduction or other use of the accounts published here without the expressed written consent of TheGameShowFix.com is strictly prohibited. At no time has TheGameShowFix.com or its predecessor, TVgameshows.net, ever been offered for public sale, such as in a stock offering or any financial transaction. Any attempt to engage in such practice is illegal and strictly forbidden. |
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