There’s no other way to say this: on Friday, the Pedestrian team took the afternoon off work to go on The Price is Right. Yes, it is a hard job, but someone has to do it. After three Larry Emdur memes, two attempts at getting on the show and one overall very trying experience, here are five things we took away from our fifteen minutes of primetime fame on The Price is Right. Come on down, y’all!
1. They want/you need to get boozed
Get there early. If you’ve entertained any notion of getting into and onto this show, you’ve got to wholly commit yourself to the cause. Blow off work and make your way to the café/bar at the Australian Technology Park, Sette or something. A registration table will be set up in the corner and you’re going to want to position your team as close as possible to the producer’s bench. Remember, there’s strength in numbers! We were about 12 strong, and there were approximately 200 people in the audience, so I think we had a 6% chance of getting on. Don’t hold me to that though, I’m bad with numbers.
While you’re waiting for the People With Clipboards to appear, stake out your competition. They’re mostly cake-faced frumpsters straddling either side of menopause, fond of dollar sign eye glasses and prone to severe bouts of Larry Emdur Hysteria. Like rejects from their own hen’s night, they’re especially fond of wearing miniature cowboy hats with party girl embellishments and feathers in a primarily pink/black palette. They faze easy and early on, again heightening your chances. Have a drink while you’re waiting, or better yet, set up a tab. You’ve got time to kill.
2. Have a story prepared
The next phase is perhaps the most important. Producers from the show will conduct interviews with all the hopeful/less contenders. As anyone who has ever watched any show on television will know, you need to have your story worked out. They’re going to want to know the most interesting thing about you, which can lead to some confronting naval-gazing about whether or not you’re actually interesting. Hey, you’ve made it this far, right? Of course you are!
After your interview, the producers will actively encourage you to get another drink at the bar. Now you know why the audiences on these shows look completely wasted: because they are! It’s actually like this!
3. Bring patience/sustenance/awesome signs
After the interview round, you’ll still have an hour to kill so study up on the network live-feed screening on monitors around the bar. What? You forgot to eat lunch? Have another drink, that always helps. Use the bathroom now – I cannot emphasise this enough.
Finally it’s time to enter the studio. Like cattle, you’re corralled through the backstage area and into a surprisingly small studio warmed by the hot flashes of both glaring stage lights and contestants alike. Here you meet Anthony Salami [disclaimer: not sure if that’s his name] and he’ll be talking at you for the next, say, four hours? Anthony uses his newly appointed position as crowd warmer to test out new material for his stand up routine, including (but definitely not limited to) Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonations, Snoop Dogg rapping the alphabet, and other highly-scripted exchanges with Brody, the polyester clad guy with a teflon smile who says “Come on dooooown!“
Get your creative juices flowing by getting into theme, i.e. don telegenically hyper coloured outfits to increase your visibility and thus your chances. No stranger to puns, we painstaking crafted signs including “Will You Larry Me?” and “I’m High On EMDUR.M.A.” Speaking of substance abuse, there’s no readily available food save for some liquorice toffees and no free water, unless of course you BYO. I staved off insanity with mints and swallowing what was left of my pride! It was delicious.
4. It’s exhausting
Unless you frequent television studio audiences (and if you do, what is wrong with you?), you’re never going to have clapped this much in your entire life. It is exhausting. You’ll sit through the taping of three separate episodes each consisting of three contestants and a showcase, and you’ll spend much of that time clapping and cheering in a state of eventual delirium. It’s like four hours of feigned enthusiasm and it’s soul destroying.
By the end of the third episode, not only had 8/12 of us dropped like flies, but I was head-splittingly hungover and about to burst. If you’re lucky you’ll get given a piece of paper that says you’re allowed to go on a bathroom visit, supervised, ten people at a time. No joke. Supervised bathroom visits are a thing for a chosen few, like conjugal visits to an inmate but infinitely more satisfying.
5. How To Win, or good things* come to those who wait
Just when you thought you literally couldn’t go on any longer, you might be lucky enough to actually ‘Come on doooown!’ as Costa, one of our remaining few, did. Not only did this provide us with the shot of adrenalin we needed, but it also provided Costa with over $1000 in rec hall-style entertainment, including *a table tennis table and an air hockey table that turns into a pool table and it made for outstanding television.
Here’s Costa on set guessing the prices of Crunchie chocolates, air freshener, a manicure set and coconut water. #Nofilter, my camera’s just ferked.
Worth the four hour wait for 5 minutes of on-air time plus the license the dick around on camera with the ridiculous glam models? And a photo-op with Lurry Ermdurs? Absolutely.
In the name of srs jrnlsm and in the hope that you too might one day win some white goods, I interviewed Costa once the studio lights went down and the adrenalin wore off:
How does it feel to go on, and win on, The Price is Right? I can’t really feel anything. It’s one of those feelings where everything happens so fast, everyone’s yelling at you trying to do this and that, you get so lost. It hasn’t really hit me. It’s exhausting and by the third episode I was very close to leaving. You can a very big rush of adrenalin and then you just need to chill the fuck out, which is why we’re in a bar having beers now.
So after you putt-putted your way to victory, what happens? Firstly you have to downplay your skills at putt-putt. Once you win and realise that you’ve actually won something they usher you back stage, you fill out a release form for the delivery of the prizes, they go through the value of the prizes.
How much was yours valued at? I won a table tennis table to the value of $428 and a hockey table to the value of $682.
If someone wanted to get on the show, what’s an interview answer that’ll give them a better chance at getting on the show, and possibly winning? What did you say? I pretty much told them I’m not here to win, I’m just here to have fun. That’s what I told them. And look like you’re from Degrassi Junior High. That’s important.
