The reason that I ask is that I currently have a question in GQ dealing with cooking shows and what happens to the food after the taping stops.
As I was reading the replies I was struck by the fact that no one who had actually been apart of a television taping had come in to comment on what really happens. I know it’s early in that threads life to expect someone to come in a say they were apart of a cooking shows audience, but it occurred to me that in all the time that I’ve been reading threads around here, I’ve never once run across someone saying that they’ve been apart of a ‘studio audience’.
Now I’m curious.
Has anyone ever been apart of a studio audience? Any show that us mainstream folks would know? What was the experience like? I’d always thought that if I’d actually seen a taping of a favorite sitcom that I like, I’d end up hating the show by seeing all the behind the scenes stuff. True?
Well, I went to a taping of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno once. Before/during the commercials, an assistant comes out and starts throwing Tonight Show merchandise out to the audience… I managed to snag a Tonight Show Hippo, which I named Eddie Norton (Edward Norton was a guest that night).
I was on twice when I was 4 and 5 and was in the audience a few times. Of course, I was a kid, so just being there was cool. The fact that they gave us stuff was just a bonus.
I’ve been in lots of studio audiences. Most people who’ve spent any time in LA have.
Have you ever noticed that one lady in the studio audience of I Love Lucy who says “Uh-oh” as the comedic tension builds? She must have attended every single taping.
Tonight show twice. Edd Hall tried to warm up the audience
a bit, with the same patter word for word.
“Dave’s World” (the Dave-Barry’s-life based sitcom with
Harry Anderson a few years back). Kind of fun. It was
really a pretty honest thing, if that’s what the OP is
asking. The only thing was the guy pumping the audience
told us if we found something funny, please laugh <i>out loud</i>.
Seemed fair to me.
They did have to do a scene with the dog a few times.
But there were no tricks, really. The thing that was
broadcast on TV was pretty much what I experienced,
including the laughter.
Yes and what a tedious experience it was. This was a sketch comedy show taped in Melbourne.
Now it may well be different and slicker in the Big Smoke, but honestly, by the end I was almost crying with boredom, and could never watch that show again and feel as positive about it.
Because the actors need to change costumes, alter makeup and the sets are changed between sketches, we sat there with the warm-up man (admittedly a good one) working and working and working us during the interminable breaks. I mean you can only laugh SO much…
The funny bits were cool, but there were so few of them. The 45 minute show took about three and a half to four hours to record.
Redboss
PS I think the uh-oh lady was actually a recording, sorry mason’. Or was that a joke?
I went to a Letterman taping. Before we went into the studio, we spent about two hours in a staging area next door. During those two hours, we had it drilled into our heads that we were to be UP. We had to cheer, laugh, applaud, etc, even when the jokes bombed (a lot of them did).
We evidently seemed like a lackadaisical group because just before being led into the studio, a producer threatened to replace people with stand-bys unless we promised to comply with the instructions.
One thing I didn’t expect was that Letterman did his own warm-up. My date got to ask him a question during the warm up, and during the taping both of us got a lot of air time as he kept referring to her silly question throughout the show.
Something I found a little odd: During the stand-up comedian, Dave sat at his desk and looked completely bored. He didn’t even crack a smile during the whole routine. Of course when the comedian was done, Dave was all smiles and told him how funny he was.
I was at a taping of Family Feud, back during the Richard Dawson years. As Bob T notes, they’re very efficient at taping five shows (a week’s worth) in a couple of hours. Between shows, everyone goes and changes. After standing undeer studio lights, I’m not surprised 9it also helps the illusion of taping on different days). I was VERY surprised that they actually allow only 1-2 minutes for the commercial breaks, when they might easily take as long as they wanted, just stopping the cameras. But I guess it keeps the timing right on the tape, and forces them to be efficient.
What really surprised me was that we weren’t polled for the “Family Feud” responses (“Survey says …”). Apparently the Studio Audience isn’t the group surveyed.
Before the taping they do bring out a secondary host to warm up the audience and make them receptive. After waiting out in the hot LA sun for hours, they need it. One of the most annoying aspects of the whole affair was that there weren’t any amenities – no seats, no vending machines, no water fountains, no SHADE, even. This was twenty years ago, so maybe things have changed by now.
First one was a taping of Phil Donahue’s show (waaaaaaaaaaay back when) - his show was in my town for a week, taping one show per day: my friend had tickets and said the guest was to be Carol Burnett. We get there, and it turns out that the CB interview had been taped the day before, and our day was a family involved in father-daughter incest. Not exactly a place to take a date. (He apologized for several weeks after.)
In the past few years, I’ve been to several tapings at Universal Studios and Disney MGM Studios. The parks will admit you through the back dor, and you are kept in a special set of bleachers so you cannot mingle with the paying guests and sneak into the park without paying.
Just a few:
“World Wrestling Federation” (very pre-WCW - corny, but loud and exciting - IIRC, Hulk Hogan was there). I still have the yellow foam “#1” finger they threw out into the audience.
“Roller Jam” (the skaters are actually really nice people to talk to, at least when they’re not trying to elbow each other off the track). Got an autographed t-shirt from one of the tapings.
“The Newz” (a short-lived night variety show). We sat through four tapings of that. Got a t-shirt from that one.
Hmmm. I think I’ll call the parks and see what’s taping, if anything.
For the last two years I have been to pretty much every WWF taping in Chicago except for the last one-the Backlash PPV-but I have tickets for the August Raw taping.
First off, you get to see untaped,or as they’re called,dark matches where developing wrestlers work.
Second,you can’t imagine just how loud the pyros are. Or how smoky the arena gets afterwards.
Third,at least in Chicago,you don’t want to sit ringside if the heel wins the main event unless you enjoy a beer shower.
I was at the Raw taping that Chris Jericho made his WWF debut and the one where a drunk fan jumped onto the ramp and took a swing at Triple H-and got knocked out by him for his efforts. They never showed that on tv.
Funny you should mention that, Arden. Many moons ago my older brother was at a Bozo taping in Chicago. He’s never talked about it though. Either he was too young to remember much of the event, or he was so troubled by something that happened there that he’s blocking on the whole experience. I really don’t know.
Anyrate, this is damn interesting to me. We have a little Tonight Show- Late Night action mixed in with Family Feud and Donahue. Who says the Straight Dope crowd isn’t diverse?
Redboss- Your experience is what I’d heard and feared- a whole bunch of sitting around and laughing on command. So much so, in fact, that you end up hating the show you saw being taped. Sorry it ruined it for you.
That reason alone is probably why I’ve never tried to get in and see one. It’s still interesting to read about, though.
Another Tonight Show attendee here, although I was there during the Carson era.
Actually, I was there twice–once in 1980, and again in 1988. Both times, Johnny and Ed and Doc were there, which seemed unusual–especially in 1980, when Carson was renegotiating his contract, and seemed to have every other night off.
And both times, we were asked to stay around to be the audience for a Bob Hope special. Odd that I managed that twice, but I wasn’t going to complain–I always liked the Bob Hope shows.
Also, in 1980, we went to a taping of what was to be a new show then: Solid Gold. We walked out. The musicians were lip-synching and still couldn’t get it right, and we resented being told to “get up and boogie.” After ten takes of botched lip-synching, “boogying” was the last thing we wanted to do, so we left.
I was a Jerry Springer show studio audience member. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, it was while it was still a talk show, and not a shit-slinging fest - way back in 1993. I even got up and asked a question! Wooo! TV!
But the taping itself was pretty unexciting. The lead-in music was really loud, the production staff kept telling us to be UP UP UP!, and the topics were lame, but all in all it was an…okay experience.
I was once in the studio audience for The Price Is Right. It was the strangest experience of my life.
After getting up at 5:00 in the morning to catch the first possible bus, we got to the studio at about 6:30, to learn that we were 135th in line for the 2:00pm taping. (!!) After standing in line for an eternity (with breaks for breakfast and lunch; it’s a good thing CBS Television City is right next to a farmer’s market), and getting marched past the producers (who were looking for people who could be counted on to go nuts if they got on stage), we finally got into the studio to get a lecture from Rod whats-his-name about being up, up, up. Not that we needed it; half of the crowd was apparently insane from anticipation at this point. The actual taping only took about an hour, with Bob Barker occasionally chatting up the audience during the taping breaks. Although we didn’t get on stage, the woman two places in line ahead of us did (and managed to play Tic-Tac-Toe badly, although she still won).
I think the only coherent thought I managed to have over all the insanity was that the set is a lot smaller than it looks on TV…
Back when I was in high school, we had a field trip to a Seattle television station to act as the studio audience for a daytime talk show. It was kind of a downer; the first guest was an abuse survivor, and then we had to sit through a demonstration of a vacuum cleaner (this was in the days before all-night infomercials and the home shopping network, when the shills would get themselves placed on talk shows), and the co-host’s interminable “soap opera summary” segment.
Before the taping, we were told by the producer: “The more interested you look, the more likely we are to put you on TV.” I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more focused group of people staring in abject fascination at an appliance. Sort of an Audience of the Damned, if you ask me. And I was shamelessly one of them…
Back in '99, I went to the RAW where Stone Cold made a return and began beating Triple H’s ass. Being the luck SOB that I am, I had front-row seats for this… and was less than eight feet away with the two wrestlers spilled over the barricades and into the crowd. I jumped up, ran right up to the action, and before the security could get there, I managed to shmack Triple H in the back of the head (nothing too hard… the kind of thing that wouldn’t hurt a fly).
I’ve never been part of the audience per se, but I have been to a whole bunch of tapings. I work as a PA on a show called This Hour Has 22 Minutes which tapes every week in front of a live studio audience. I can walk you through the process.
Every Canadian around here will probably know the show, but if you’re from elsewhere, it’s a bit like The Daily Show only more political. There are desk jokes about stories in the news mixed with a variety of live and recorded sketches and interviews (more like assaults really). It breaks down like this:
The doors open a half an hour before the show. The audience is given free wine and pop.
The audience is seated and the creative producer (who is also a standup comic) comes out and does the same bit every week, explaining about the exits etc. He basically fills time until the cast is ready.
The cast is introduced and as they get final touch ups the producer asks people in the audience where they’re from and what they’re doing in town etc, generally making fun as he goes along. Evenin’ Opal.
The cast run through the entire desk routine (which includes more jokes than actually make it into the show). Any segments or parts of segments which have been pre-recorded are aired on large monitors around the studio. Any screw ups by the cast are re-done on the spot as quickly as possible. They do sometimes get into laughing fits but I don’t think too many people mind (other than the writer’s whose punchlines often get crippled by too many false starts). The cast often actively try to make each other mess up.
After the desk jokes, the cast put on two or three live sketches. This might be a bit tedious because they need to change before each of them. They’ll run through the sketches at least twice.
Before the last sketch there is an intermission during which more wine and pop is available.
The final sketch is taped and the audience is free to mill about for a while. They can usually talk to the cast and a lot of people have their pictures taken on the set (if they have cameras).
The whole thing last about three hours with the doors opening at 7:30 and the last sketch ending between 10:30 and 11:00. The tickets are free, but in high demand. I guess there are about 250 people in the audience on any given night.