Bob Barker, Emmy Award

May 14, 2024

An animal-rights activist, he compered Miss America and Miss Universe for 20 years but quit over the practice of giving fur coats as prizes

Bob Barker, who has died aged 99, was an avuncular fixture on American television for half a century, most notably as host of the popular game show The Price Is Right from 1972 to 2007, a stint that earned him 19 Daytime Emmy Awards, plus an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement in 1999.

The show featured contestants, picked from a studio audience, trying to guess the price of consumer products ranging from cans of pork’n’beans to portable spas and washing machines, and playing games to win prizes. It made its debut on US television in 1956, with Bill Cullen as its host, and ran for nine years before being taken off air. A new version was launched in 1972 with new game elements, and became a daytime TV institution with the smiley, smooth-talking Barker at the helm for 6,586 episodes.

A studio announcer would intone the words “Come on down!” as the chosen contestants would trot out of the studio audience down to “Contestants’ Row” to be greeted by Barker. To add to the visual appeal, Barker was supported by female models known as “Barker’s Beauties” whose main function was to pose seductively, flashing their pearly whites as they suggestively stroked leaf-blowers, microwaves, pinball machines, new cars and other desirables, before presenting the prizes to the lucky winners.

Such was the fervid atmosphere that overwrought participants sometimes caused Barker physical harm. He suffered broken toes when a contestant, hopping around in excitement, landed on his foot, and damage to his teeth when a short contestant gripped him in a bear hug and jumped up and down under his chin.

Consumer frenzy sometimes overcame social niceties. Barker recalled an occasion when a woman in the audience went into labour and announced that her baby was just about to come: “When I offered to have an usher help her out so she could get to the hospital, she declined saying, ‘You may call my name, and I might win.’” On another occasion a woman wearing a “boob tube” became so excited, jiggling up and down when her name was called, that “she came on down, and they came on out!”

But Barker could generally rely on his deadpan wit to head off unwelcome assaults. To a woman contestant who demanded to kiss him, he responded, “No, I’m working. Meet me in the parking lot later.”

Barker was also known for his dedication to the cause of animal rights, to which he gave large sums of money, including $5 million for a 1,200-tonne anti-whaling ship named the Bob Barker, some $800,000 to transporting three African elephants from Toronto Zoo to a warmer billet in California and $380,000 to create a haven at a sanctuary in Louisiana for HIV-infected chimpanzees.

When an auction was held among trophy hunters in Dallas to shoot an elderly male black rhino at a game park in Namibia, supposedly to aid conservation, Barker protested: “As an older male myself, I must say that this seems like a rather harsh way of dealing with senior citizens.” He offered to auction an autographed photograph of himself instead, but the offer was not taken up.

Barker signed off each episode of The Price Is Right with the words “This is Bob Barker reminding you to help control the pet population – have your pets spayed or neutered,” and in 1995 he founded a charity called the DJ&T Foundation which enabled pet owners to do just that.

Robert William Barker was born on December 12 1923 in Darrington, Washington, where his father Byron worked as a foreman on an electricity power-line project. Byron Barker died in a work-related accident when his son was six, and afterwards his mother Matilda, a teacher, took him to Mission, South Dakota, to live on a Sioux Indian reservation. When she remarried, the family moved to Springfield, Missouri.

Barker enlisted in the US navy as an aviation cadet during the Second World War, earning his wings in 1945, and was about to be assigned overseas when the war ended.

While studying economics at Drury University in Springfield, he took a part-time job with a local radio station. He continued to work in radio after graduating, moving in 1950 to California, where he hosted The Bob Barker Show.

In 1956 Ralph Edwards, creator of the television game show Truth or Consequences, picked him to host the show. Contestants were challenged to answer strange questions or provide the punchline to corny jokes (“Why was the wife concerned because her husband was a light drinker? Every night he’d drink until it got light”), the penalty for failure involving the performance of embarrassing stunts – often involving water, shaving cream or hula skirts.

Barker briefly did overlapping duty on The Price Is Right and hosted other shows including a two-decade run as MC of the Miss Universe and Miss America pageants, a role from which he resigned in 1988 when organisers refused to stop handing out fur coats as prizes.

During his long career on The Price Is Right he and producers were sued by a number of “Barker’s Beauties” including, most notably, Dian Parkinson, who filed a suit against Barker in 1994, claiming that she had been coerced into a sexual relationship with him. Barker admitted the affair but insisted that it had been consensual: “She told me that I had been so strait-laced and that it was time I had a little hanky-panky in my life, and she volunteered the hanky-panky. It was a case of two middle-aged consenting adults having sex.”

Dian Parkinson withdrew the suit in 1995, though not before David Letterman had a bit of fun at Barker’s expense on his Late Show, his list of “Top Ten Bob Barker Pick-up Lines” including: “Maybe it’ll be easier for you to guess the price of the water bed if we test it out first.”

In 1996 Barker played a cantankerous version of himself in the hit film comedy Happy Gilmore, in which he was seen playing in a pro-am golf tournament with Happy (Adam Sandler), an excitable failed hockey player-turned-golfer, and ends up coming to blows in a comic brawl that ends with Sandler spitting on Barker and snarling, “The price is WRONG, bitch.’’

In 1945 Barker married his high-school sweetheart Dorothy Gideon, who died of cancer in 1981. There were no children. He is survived by Nancy Burnet, his companion of 40 years.

Bob Barker, born December 12 1923, died August 29 2023