Many, many years ago, I went to a taping of the GE College Bowl. I’m not sure how my parents got the tickets, though my father did sell GE appliances. It was a weekly game show, so the taping took under an hour. It may even have gone out live.
Since I work in television, scads. Working live is the most fun, but even live-to-tape can be nerve-wracking. Simply taping can be tedius beause you can do it over so many times to make it “perfect.” Very little of what I’ve worked on has made it to a national audience (though you can see some online). It’s semi-exciting. Studio lights can be hot. 
Writing for TV is unglamorous; your work is done mostly before production begins.
Just remembered, if we’re including radio, I saw A Prairie Home Companion probably about 4 or 5 times when the show came to NYC. I used to be a huge fan. I had a blast every time, but the best part was watching the sound effects guy.
I’d love to see some. Where can I go to see it?
Hollywood Squares in the late 1960’s. They taped three shows at a time. 1.5 hours of airtime took over 3 hrs hours to tape. Shelly Berman was an A$$, Phyllis Diller was a hoot. We were supposed to go see a taping of the Dean Martin Show the next night, but my parents refused to go because the Hollywood Squares was just so BORING to them. Tickets were from a friend of my folks who worked at the studio. Taped at NBC.
Cheers in the 1984 [?]. Taped one show, IIRC it was 8 days prior to the air date. Was a great experience. Nicholas Colasanto was REALLY like the character he played on the show. It was the Bell Day episode. Tickets were easy to get, a group of us from work just wrote in for 8 tickets, we all signed the letter and they sent them to us. Taped at Paramount, IIRC.
This was the same system that we encountered when I saw the Johnny Carson show taped at the NBC studios in Burbank, California back in the 1980s. We lined up early in the morning, got our tickets, then returned later in the day for the taping. Because more tickets were distributed than seats were available, we got there early again. It was worth it though, as we made it in and had great seats.
Then, when the Carson show was over, somebody announced to all of us that if we would like to stick around to form the audience for a Bob Hope special, we were welcome to. Everybody did. So then I saw Bob Hope and his guests (one of whom was Tony Randall, but I forget the others).
I was at a taping of a bunch of skits for Kids In The Hall in Toronto back around 1990 or so. I don’t remember what skits they were (I might remember if I saw them again). I also don’t remember if there was a fee to get in.
Each skit was presented one after another with no re-takes, like watching a play. There were no errors that I can remember. I don’t remember being instructed to laugh. What I do remember was that everything they did that night was really good funny material. I was disappointed when I saw the skits in the tv shows later as they were dispersed amongst other ‘lesser’ material.
My husband and I went to a taping of Drew Carey’s Improv-A-Ganza in Vegas in 2011. It was basically the cast of the U.S. “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” without Wayne Brady, and for GSN. It started with about half an hour of Drew Carey’s stand-up, followed by the improv when the taping started. The show was awesome–we really enjoyed it–but it seemed like it was really geared more toward the live performance aspect rather than the TV production. We were excited to watch the show when it came on TV, but the video quality was so bad I didn’t see more than a couple of episodes and never saw the one we were there for.
no…
I attended the taping of a game show for Canada’s Discovery Channel called Qubit; I think it only lasted for a few episodes. I found out about it via a crawl during the broadcast of some show on Discovery that said something like “If you would like tickets to see the taping of a game show or you would like to appear on a game show, go to discovery.ca/gameshow” or whatever. Then I emailed in a form with my choice of dates and they sent an email back with a confirmation.
As some other people have noted above, new shows can have a lot of technical problems. At least that was the case with Qubit. It was a fairly generic quiz show, but twice during the taping they had extended difficulties with the computer system (either the buzzer or the display for the emcee). The taping of a 1/2-hour episode took over 2 hours, I think!
I kept thinking that the questions weren’t very hard and the contestants weren’t very outgoing, so maybe I should have applied to be a contestant instead of just sitting in the audience. There were a few cases where there was some sort of glitch with the contestant answering, so they had to reshoot it. E.g. “Okay, now Jane will buzz in again and give the same answer she gave before. Nobody else buzz in!”
All in all, it was a bit boring, but it was interesting to see the mechanics behind a TV show.
Went to the Price Is Right about 1993ish. Long, tedious waiting but worth it.
Saw a taping of the old Roseanne sitcom. Mostly one take except for one seen they did over. I think most sitcoms tape a dress rehearsal without the audience, and then use that for punch-ins.
Went on a work outing to a taping of Mad TV.
A few movie scenes I saw in person:
The first Speed, when he’s in the coffee shop and the bus blows up outside, I was at the end of the block watching them film.
Another time I saw a crew pulling the Brady Bunch station wagon, filming the first movie, so I’m probably one of the sets of headlights you see when they are searching for Jan.
It doesn’t sound like what you’re interested in, but I was in the last public audience for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. (Friday night, his last episode, was a clip show with an invited audience of staff members and their families. Thursday night was a regular audience with “Johnny’s final guests,” Robin Williams and Bette Midler. That’s the one I was at.)
I saw that. Bette Midler sang One For My Baby and it looked like Carson had tears in his eyes. It was very emotional. Was it like that in person?
Perhaps 15 years ago, we were on vacation in LA, and I think it was like "show up at this big parking lot, and get on a bus to the studio. I forget our first pick, but we wound up with Roseanne as there were no more seats for the other.
They ran it pretty much live to tape with no re-takes that I can remember. Just breaks to move from the kitchen to the living room, and over to a mockup of the Jerry Springer show set. Don’t recall the specific episode, other than the Springer connection and that it was something like the 100th episode.
Yes. Well, I no longer live in Minnesota, so I haven’t attended a taping of Prairie Home Companion in twenty years. But as of the last time I went, yes. It was an event. You didn’t need to wear a tux or anything, I don’t think there was an official dress code, but if you didn’t dress up at least a little, you’d look kinda out of place given the number of people who were dressed up. This was an EVENT. Garrison Keillor dresses up a lot more now than he did when he started, too.
Really, it’s not for the radio audience’s benefit–but for the people in the theater during the performance.
I’ve been to a taping of The Price is Right (already discussed here) and American Idol. Two things stick out in my mind:
(1) You stand around waiting in lines FOREVER.
(2) The set is pretty tiny in person but looks fairly huge on TV.
I’m too impatient to wait in hours-long lines anymore so it would have to be a truly awesome show to make it worth the wait.
I have been to quite a few:
Price Is Right
Perfect Strangers (one of the first episodes, first season)
The Lucy Show (Lucille Ball’s last, horrible sitcom)
Arsenio Hall talk show back then.
The Tonight Show (once with Johnny Carson, once with Jay Leno)
I am sure I am missing quite a few.
I was also a contestant on a game show, which I fortunately cannot remember the name of as I was horrible and it was a true embarrassment. I only got the parting gifts and never told a single sole I was on the show, so luckily nobody I know watched it!
A few years ago I attended a taping of Mock the Week. A friend of mine was on one of the BBC mailing lists where they solicit for audiences. We turned up with a printout of the invitiation email, registered at the door, and got numbered badges - then at the appointed time they let in the first couple of hundred people - all fairly well organised.
We knew what the show was all about because it had run for several series already. Despite it being a half-hour show, filming ran for two and a half hours or thereabouts, mostly because the panelists would just machine-gun out responses, and for every one which was used there was one unfunny and two very funny but unbroadcastable. By the end of the evening my ribs hurt from laughing. Since the panelists are all stand-up comedians they would just entertain themselves during the set changes and camera shifts by ragging on each other or bantering with the crowd. The ‘warmup’ dude had the most miserable job going because he was so horribly outgunned in terms of ability, he must have felt like a donkey at the Kentucky Derby.
The whole experience was very friendly and matey, pretty much what you would expect from watching the show. The one big surprise for me was that between every segment they would record two links, one with each ‘team’ winning, and at the end of the show they recorded a ‘this weeks winners’ for each side - everything actually gets decided in the editing suite. Not sure why this hadn’t occurred to me, it makes perfect sense in retrospect.
Way back when I was a wee lad I saw the Bozo Show. This was in Chicago in the late 70s or early 80s and that show was in its prime and tickets were hard to come by, but somehow my mother got them from someone who got them from someone or some other chain of events. This show was live and it was kind of cool to be a part of it, but it really did seem so much different from watching it at home. It was a lot harder to follow the action when they did skits way over on the other side of the stage, their backs were to us quite a bit so I couldn’t tell what was going on, and there were tiny little black and white TVs used for monitors so I really couldn’t see the Bozo cartoon either. On top of that, I was this close to making it on Bozo Buckets, but there was already a boy chosen or the arrows blinked just above my head or something. People did tell me that they saw me on the show, but this was years before VCRs became popular so I was never able to see it.
Not yet, but going to a Price Is Right taping at MSU Oct 13. Will post if I get to come on down.