Catch Phrase Art James

[wdm1219inpenna]

Recently I began watching and listening to old "Catch Phrase" episodes that are on youtube.

Whenever a piece of the Super Catch Phrase was revealed, in addition to music playing, it often sounded like there was a lot of chattering in the audience as well.

This puzzled me, since I would think the audience would be instructed to keep quiet, in case they gave away an answer.  Also I would think silence would be wanted by the contestants so they could try to concentrate on the puzzle to solve it.

Was this audience chatter I heard?  If so, doesn't it seem wrong that it was allowed?

[TimK2003]

Since you only heard it while the square was being revealed, it always sounded to me that was "canned" chatter added to the audio.

[BrandonFG]

Just listened to part of an episode...it definitely sounds canned. My guess is the producers wanted to make the home audience think the studio audience was talking amongst themselves, like a quieter version of the TPiR crowd yelling out dollar values.

Granted, it doesn't work here, but maybe they wanted it to sound "busy". At first, I actually thought the audience was chuckling at the animations.

[BillCullen1]

I liked Catch Phrase. I also thought Art James was a good host who didn't work as often as Bill Cullen, Tom Kennedy or Wink Martindale.

[wdm1219inpenna]

Art was indeed a most underrated television host.  I remember watching reruns of Pay Cards (not Super Pay Cards but the original) on WNEW Channel 5 New York.  I also have fond memories of watching "The Magnificent Marble Machine", even though it is deemed one of the worst game shows of all time by many game show fans.

Art's signature show was "The Who What or Where" game.  I never saw it on TV but did discover it on youtube.  A very good show, a pre-cursor to Dick Clark's "The Challengers".

Art sadly was saddled with some bad premises for games, such as "Marble" and "Blank Check".  I am surprised Catch Phrase didn't last longer than only 13 weeks. 

Bill Cullen had some very solid game shows in "Chain Reaction" and "Blockbusters" just to name a couple, and yet they too did not last very long.  I guess without ratings, no matter how solid a game appears to be, it won't last very long.

[snowpeck]

It was a really tough marketplace in 1985-1986. There were at least 13 game shows in syndication alone that year. Only Wheel, Jeopardy, Newlywed Game, $100K Pyramid and $1M Chance of a Lifetime survived.