Suppose they had a game show...

[Jimmy Owen]

If only a few people show up to a game show audience, are they admitted or turned away?  One time on "Body Language" Tom was speaking to Johnny and when they cut to Johnny he was awash in a sea of empty seats.

[uncamark]

[quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' date=\'Dec 22 2003, 04:20 PM\']If only a few people show up to a game show audience, are they admitted or turned away?  One time on "Body Language" Tom was speaking to Johnny and when they cut to Johnny he was awash in a sea of empty seats.[/quote]
Oh, they'd let them in.  Johnny O was probably sweating profusely doing the warmup in any of those situations, even if he knew that Mother MacKenzie would bail him out eventually.

[BrandonFG]

[quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' date=\'Dec 22 2003, 04:20 PM\'] If only a few people show up to a game show audience, are they admitted or turned away?  One time on "Body Language" Tom was speaking to Johnny and when they cut to Johnny he was awash in a sea of empty seats. [/quote]
 In his interview with Steve Beverly, Peter Marshall said he walked in on a Wheel taping in the 70s and saw about seven people sitting in the audience. I think he said it was family of the contestants.

[davemackey]

From an old alt.tv.game-shows post (tis the season for reruns)

I went to a taping of "Blockbusters" once that almost didn't have an audience. There must have been about six or seven of us there. (A small but appreciative crowd.) It was fun, and even with the small crowd Rich Jeffries and Mike Narz (son of Jack Narz) made us feel right at home.

Part of the reason for the small crowd was that "Blockbusters" had only been back on the air for three or four days at the time of this taping (people didn't know what it was), and the show was having a great deal of difficulty getting its Dubner game graphics in good working order; thus the tapings were running much longer than normal.

(Originally Aired: February 4, 1997)

[JayC]

They said on the Hollywood Squares THS that in the early days, they had to pull tour groups and pay them so they could have an audience.

[Ian Wallis]

Some of the early episodes of "Price is Right" that were run on GSN a few years ago showed a lot of empty seats.

[MitchJoseph2004]

And wasn't it good ol' Richard Dawson who wouldn't do Feud if there wasn't a big crowd that day.........?

So what did they have to do to pull people in?

[scully24]

Of course nowadays they routinely pay extras to fill an audience if they want to guarantee a live audience.  The benefit of this is they don't have to worry about people getting tired and leaving if there are long days and production delays.  Twenty years ago, attending a TV taping was enough of a novelty that they used to get free audiences even for pilots.  Now there is such a glut of television production that people are too jaded to want to come to a taping, except for the most popular shows.  So it's another part of the budget, to hire extras for the audience.  Sometimes school groups will come in and sit as audience members and get paid for it as a fun fundraiser for their school.

[goongas]

ESPN's 2 Minute Drill last season had paid people from the actors unions in the audience.

Millionaire this season let's audience members take the audition test before the show, and they usually had no problem getting audience members.

[scully24]

It would be an exciting thing if more game shows figured out ways to recruit contestants directly from their audiences--especially if they could put people on the show that day or fairly immediately.  It would beef up audience size and add more electricity to the taping atmosphere.

[trainman]

[quote name=\'goongas\' date=\'Dec 23 2003, 10:23 AM\'] ESPN's 2 Minute Drill last season had paid people from the actors unions in the audience. [/quote]
 As did GSN's very own "Who Wants to Be Governor of California?"  (Pretty much everyone you saw in the audience was paid...the unpaid audience members like me were in the back, with plenty of empty seats around us, out of camera range.)