Big wheel keep on turnin’
I watched The Price Is Right possibly every day of my life until I was maybe 6 or 7. My great grandmother never missed a day, and she made all television viewing decisions for the house. (You could attempt to, say, watch some cartoons, and she’d let you, but you had to deal with the running commentary: “that could never happen” or “anvils are heavy– he’d be dead if that fell on him in real life”. It just wasn’t worth it.)
I always loathed the noon news on KDKA with father/daughter anchor team Patti and Bill Burns. But I didn’t mind TPIR: all those buzzers and bells, the little cartoon mountain climber climbing the alps, the big wheel. I realized when I read this bit in The Morning News, how much I too ached– still ache– to spin that big wheel and get as close as I can to a dollar without going over.
…Now, it seemed to sum up America in some meaningful way. It was a show that rewarded its contestants for being consumers. Its backbone, its raison d’etre, was product placement. And oh my God, how I wanted to spin that Big Wheel. I still ache for it. The next time someone asks me what I’m taking to a desert island, that’s what I’m telling them: I’m taking the Big Wheel.
There was also some interesting talk of The Price Is Right as an exemplar of clarity over at the Signal vs. Noise blog that’s worth a read.
November 4th, 2006 at 9:09 am
I remember watching TPIR with my grandmother all the time. She worked around the house all day but she had breaks scheduled around her favorite shows and TPIR was the one I liked watching with her.
I still have the theme for Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless burned into my brain, just because those were my cues to go outside and play.
November 5th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Way to ruin cartoons, Gram.
I watched so much malarky as a wee thing (including The Price Is Right, The 25,000 Pyramid, and all of the CBS soaps)–hence my ability to turn almost anything into an advertisement. And now back to our regularly scheduled blog post…
November 6th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Well, I do exaggerate for comedic effect. It was more like a TV rationing system, and Saturday morning, we did get to watch cartoons. And a fair bit of Sesame Street happened in the afternoons. Grandma would just shuffle off and do something else. Or not.
And, Dear, your ability to turn anything into an advertisement or a work of art was one of the things which endeared me to you early. I remember in the early days of the Terri & Ezra Show, you made a wrong turn, and so you had to pull into a parking lot, where you said “Turning the car around– by Terri Wise”