CBS

“Many people have the idea that game shows are easy to come up with,” Bob Barker once said. “And nothing could be further from the truth.” The same goes for hosting a game show. But here are 20 TV personalities who have made it look easy, starting with the retired host of “The Price Is Right” as he celebrates his 95th birthday

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Bob Barker had the more fitting name, but Monty Hall, emcee and creator of “Let’s Make a Deal,” was the ultimate carnival barker as game show host. With his checkered blazers and pockets full of cash, the affable con man (who died in 2017) bartered with his outlandishly dressed audience, giving contestants the opportunity to choose door 1, 2 or 3, behind any of which might be a new car or just a bucket of cottage cheese. Hall’s aim was to get home viewers “yelling at the screen,” he once said. “Then you know you’ve got an audience.”

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As the host of “Password” from 1961 to 1975, Allen Ludden would casually lean over his podium and shoot a gently sardonic look over his glasses toward the viewing audience as a pair of celebrities—often including his wife, Betty White (seen here)—and two contestants tried to connect clue to word. Although “Password” has been revived many times since Ludden’s death in 1981, it has never been the same. As Betty White said when asked why she never remarried, “Once you’ve had the best, who needs the rest?”

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For 34 years and over 7,000 episodes, “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek has presented himself as the man with all the answers, and audiences have loved him for it. Along the way, he has won five Emmys for Outstanding Game Show Host and picked up a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Not to mention being immortalized by Will Ferrell on “Saturday Night Live.” His gift is his ability to make every viewer shouting answers at the TV feel like the smartest one in the room—even though we know that distinction belongs to Trebek himself..

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A Vietnam vet (he was a DJ for Armed Forces Radio in Saigon), Sajak took over “Wheel of Fortune” duties from its original host Chuck Woolery in 1981, bringing to the show a folksy and gently self-mocking everyman personality that instantly endeared him to audiences—and, 37 years later, still does. With longtime sidekick Vanna White, he makes it all look easy. As Sajak puts it, with characteristic modesty, “Sometimes you just stumble into something that works.”

(Excerpt) Read More at: PurpleClover.com