Quick Rod Roddy Question

[JasonA1]

Anybody who's seen a taping of PYL or any other show Rod's done - was his warm-up similar to the one for TPIR? How tailored do warm-ups get? I assume Johnny O's warm-up for TPIR and MG were different, but I'm not sure how greatly they differed outside of show-specific directions for the crowd.

-Jason

[tvrandywest]

[quote name=\'JasonA1\' date=\'Nov 28 2005, 01:02 PM\']Anybody who's seen a taping of PYL or any other show Rod's done - was his warm-up similar to the one for TPIR? How tailored do warm-ups get? I assume Johnny O's warm-up for TPIR and MG were different, but I'm not sure how greatly they differed outside of show-specific directions for the crowd.

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Both Johnny's and Rod's warm-ups for "Price" were very different than their warm-ups for other shows.

"Price" has always been unique in what it needs from a warm-up act in four distinct ways that makes the warm-up for "Price" different: 1) The show starts on schedule at a specific time; the warm-up knows exactly how long his material needs to be, and it allows him the opportunity to build to a crescendo of energy just as the show begins. 2) The show records "live to tape", meaning without stop-downs (until the few in recent years). 3) the host prefers to do the majority of the audience maintenance during commercial breaks. And 4) the audience is present for only one episode.

With virtually every other show the start time remains flexible to accommodate a great many things like final hair and make-up fixes, as well as last minute bathroom breaks for the celebs and/or contestants. The warm-up has to be prepared to stretch or cut the act on a moment's notice. Every other show had and has multiple stop-downs of indeterminate length that the warm-up (as opposed to the host) is responsible for filling. And other shows traditionally all keep an audience for a bare minimum of two episodes. Those stop-down moments and between-show acts are far less "staged presentations" and sometimes include even quite informal dialogue with the audience. Both Johnny and Rod had their own favorite "shtick" that they would ad-lib around during most taping sessions.

All that is beyond the show-specific information for the audience, such as the various instructions for "Price" contestants and the show specific responses to the game play that you need to evoke from the audience (yell the prices or "Go"/"Stop", or "Higher"/"Lower" for TPiR, PYL or CS respectively. As opposed to "don't whisper the answers" for MG and every Q&A based game. Stuff like that there   ;-)


Randy
tvrandywest.com

[davidhammett]

I saw a taping of PYL in 1985; as Randy has alluded to, Rod's warmup was necessarily very different for that show.  He interacted with the audience during every commercial break (you can often see him walking up into the audience as the show goes out to commercial after a question round).

The "highlights" of his interactions while I was there -- someone in the audience asked him where they could get good peach pie, and Rod responded Marie Callender's; I made it to one that night for dinner (and pie!) -- and at one point he asked where I was from; I said Atlanta, but he wanted more detail; figuring he couldn't possibly know all the suburbs, I went ahead and mentioned Smyrna, at which point he proceeded to mention a very famous restaurant located there; turns out he used to do radio at WQXI in Atlanta.

It was also very cool after the show when I went to the artists' entrance to meet a page who was going to bring me a card to order a PYL T-shirt -- and while waiting there out comes Rod and Peter headed to lunch; Rod thanked me for coming.  It was a pleasure to meet him, both then and again when he was doing TPIR.