Bob Barker hosts 'The Price Is Right Million-Dollar Spectacular' Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. on CBS.

Bob Barker, come on down! You're being celebrated for your 35 years on The Price Is Right.

Before the genial 17-time Emmy winner retires from the weekday game show by taping his final episode in June, CBS will fête him in two prime-time specials: a new edition of 'The Price Is Right Million-Dollar Spectacular' Wednesday, May 16, and Bob Barker: A Celebration of 50Years on Television Thursday, May 17.

"Once you announce your retirement, people are much nicer to you," muses Barker, who deems his 50th television anniversary an appropriate exit point. "For good publicity, that's probably only second to dying. The new shows I have taped for this season will air until late July or early August, then they will rerun earlier episodes until September. I'll be curious to see how the show looks without that old, gray-haired man."

At this writing, CBS had not named Barker's Price Is Right successor, but speculation ranged from weatherman Dave Price of The Early Show - yes, that would be Price on Price - to George Hamilton.

Having fun

"Hosts of game shows are like pie," Barker reflects. "Some people like apple, some like cherry, some like lemon. They'll have to find someone who can handle all these games; we have 75 to 80 of them, and the person will have to learn them well enough to not have to think about them.

"It has to be like riding a bicycle. You want to concentrate on having fun with the contestants and the audience, and you can't if you're worried about how to play the game. It also has to be someone who can keep an audience up for a full hour. That's a long time."

The Price Is Right, originated by game-producing icons Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, debuted on NBC in 1957 with Bill Cullen hosting a less glitzy version. As the production values grew in CBS's revival, so did the value of the prizes, but Barker admits he didn't realise his own worth at first.

"Mark Goodson was always very generous with me," he says, "but after about a year of doing the show, I found out (former CBS executive) Bud Grant had told Mark he would buy it if Mark got Bob Barker to host it. If I'd known that going in, Mark would have been even more generous!"

A dying breed

While most viewers know Barker for The Price Is Right, of which he became executive producer as well, his television career began in the mid-1950s with the quiz show Truth or Consequences.

Now up for another Daytime Emmy, he laments game show hosts are "a dying breed. The game shows they're doing at night now are not really the kind that was once so popular, and today, there's no place to learn to do what we do.

"I get letters from young people asking my advice, and I tell them to go to a college with a communications department, hopefully with its own television or radio station. Then I tell them to get a job where they can get experience. When I started out, every radio station offered the chance to host some sort of show involving people. I don't care how much natural talent you have, experience is so important."

A noted animal-rights advocate, Barker also is famous for the physical workout the 1996 golf comedy movie Happy Gilmore gave him. "I don't tape a show where someone in the audience doesn't bring it up," he says with evident pleasure. "Then they want to know if I enjoyed beating up Adam Sandler."

- Jay Bobbin, Zap2it