deal or no deal

A quick entry before we head off to Venice Beach and Santa Monica.

Well we were planning to go to a TV taping of the Late Late Show but it turned out it was cancelled due to a writers strike. So the lovely Jess found us tickets to Deal or No Deal (American prime time TV show). I hate to wreck the fantasy for some people (those who watch this show religiously) but nothing is random at a TV show taping - nothing.

Most of the audience were actually “extras” who were employed by the company to fill the seats (official part time role as ‘background actors’ - yes there is such a thing). We walked in and somehow got allocated to the “hot seats” which is behind the families so we got filmed alot, resulting in us having sore cheeks from all of the fake smiling.

We started noticing that the overweight/less fortunate looking people (by Hollywood standards), and even a lady in a wheelchair were put in a separate area of the stage which, I am not joking here, never got filmed.  We were horrified that people would be okay with this.

One employee of the show was in charge of organising the audience (no idea what her job description is but it’s not exactly politically correct) - her role meant making sure there was a mix of races (so many blacks/mexican/white people in certain areas), hair colours and good looking people in the audience. She moved everyone round for about an hour to get it right until it apparently looked good for the camera.

They had “audience shots” where they zoomed in on our faces and we had to pretend the banker had said 70 trillion dollars to get the response they wanted. We had to jump off our seats on queue, clap on queue, laugh on queue (they say “now, do a loud chuckle” and “now, do a soft chuckle”) and do everything on queue.

As I said, nothing is random. They’re in a bubble and I swear these people have no sense of reality.

It was an interesting experience to be in the audience and will be a laugh to see our kiwi faces on a primetime American TV show. Episode 335.

Must go, the timer on the computer is blinking which means I’m about to run out of time!