A few times over the years, these are the ones I remember:
Lee & Herring's This Morning With Richard Not Judy
(Riverside Studios 1999): This one only half counts as I was in the audience for two unfilmed 'rehearsals' of the main show, which were presumably easier to get tickets for by my parents - they basically tested out the material to us on the main set and removed/rewrote anything that didn't work for the proper recording, which was interesting to compare when it went out on BBC2. One memory is the end of a filmed sketch starring Kevin Eldon, which in the full version we saw had him slowly and bleakly die at the end which wasn't really that funny (as he played it rather realistically) and ended with audience silence and Lee & Herring saying something like "Ooh. Oh dear" and hastily moving on - when the sketch was aired it cut the very end out and ended on the last funny gag instead.
Best thing about these was that during the recording they spotted me in the audience (as I was 10 years old at the time and about a decade younger than anyone else there) and had a comedy chat with me in front of everyone, which was pretty amazing as a kid to be able to talk to these two comedian legends - they seemed genuinely amused and heartwarmed that they had such a young fan in the audience. Great show and a fun childhood memory.
Deal or No Deal
(Bristol Paintworks 2007): A few recordings of this shortly after the first jackpot win when the show was still huge. They were filmed in a cold March but we were told by Noel that the episodes would go out in June and July respectively, indeed one was a "4th July Special" featuring everyone in cowboy hats. Happily Noel said hello to me in the audience during a break (again the youngest there as I'd recently turned 18 ) and signed an autograph for me, he might have a negative reputation in the 80s and 90s but certainly by this point he was very friendly to all of us. Crowning fame moment was when I got to open one of the Viewer Competition boxes at the end, sadly that bit's been cut out of more recent repeats of the episode on Challenge but I still have the video which is always fun for a laugh.
It did slightly spoil my enjoyment of the show though when they filmed us pretending to cheer/gasp/look nervous etc before they'd even recorded anything, so they could slot into the episodes when needed - it's clearly something they do in all gameshows with an audience but I wasn't aware of the practice until then.
Golden Balls
(BBC Television Centre 2007): The first recording of that year's series and surreal to be watching an ITV show in a BBC building! Recording went on much, much longer than the episode itself due to various technical malfunctions from the ball machine (as it was the first recording in many months) to the point where a second episode was cancelled as we'd gone on too late. As it turned out to be a very non-memorable episode with the final two contestants both choosing the Steal ball (meaning they both won nothing) it ended up airing out of order in the middle of the series run in January 2008, and I'd come home from college late and only by chance noticed me and my Grandma behind Jasper Carrott in every shot.
Harry Hill's TV Burp
(Teddington Studios 2009): First of that year's series and the tickets for the whole run went extremely quickly online so I was lucky to get that one. Queue started forming many hours earlier, and surreally David van Day came out to say hello to us while we were waiting as he'd filmed his 'celebrity guest' bits earlier that day. Even more oddly I was sitting next to the bloke who played Nick Cotton in EastEnders (ushered in privately by the staff once the main audience had gone in) - I wondered whether they'd be some wacky moment involving him in the recording, but it looked like he was just a fan of the show who just wanted to see it live.
Again recording went on a lot longer than the episode and there were many bits that got cut out, including some slightly dodgy jokes involving raping a Tamagotchi (yes, really) and an odd bit where Harry calls up some racist polar bear or something and says "The new president is black!" and the bear angrily hangs up, I forget the context there but I wasn't surprised when it didn't make the cut. Free Carlsberg was given to all of us, Harry took several photos with fans at his desk and signed his script and gave it to someone in the audience.
Funniest bit of the whole night was when he recorded a trailer to be aired after You've Been Framed, starting with "Don't worry, I'm still here!" and then after the take wryly adding "You should be worrying if you're watching ITV on a Friday night"
Melissa & Joey
(Los Angeles, 2015): During a holiday in LA I really wanted to see how a US sitcom was filmed and checked online for tickets the day I arrived. The big names like Big Bang Theory and Two & A Half Men were long sold out, but this one starring Melissa Joan Hart was still available and I showed up to the studios, confusing a baffled security guard who radios over if anyone knows where the entrance is for 'Clarissa and Jerry'.
Security was intense, all phones & cameras handed into security and collected at the end. The warmup guy was a huge character, proudly stating he'd been in the business for years in shows like Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens, and hyping up the audience (mostly college kids aged about 16) into a mad frenzy and getting us to howl and whoop and cheer at everything. It was fascinating how, after a take, a ton of writers would swarm onto set, frantically write things down and for the second take a ton of new gags had been added for the next one to attempt (and mostly succeed) to get a better reaction. Indeed this ended up being a Very Special Episode with a life-changing twist at the end where the (now fully hyped up) college audience whooped so loudly it drowned out the dialogue and they had to retake it with us silent until the very end.
Bizarre evening for a Brit like me but really fun, particularly when the warmup man asked how far everyone had come to see this today and I casually said "London" and was treated like some super-fan for the rest of the night, even though I'd never watched an episode of it before - and still haven't seen the finished product! For fans the episode was called 'Be the Bigger Person'...
Eurovision Song Contest
(2016 Stockholm, 2017 Kiev, 2018 Lisbon, 2019 Tel Aviv): I've written
in detail before about my four Eurovision experiences, but to sum up they could be hectic at times depending on where in the arena I was (standing vs sitting), vary on both the host country's organisation and whether said host country is doing well in the results or not (as if they aren't most of the locals start leaving very early on), but overall incredible evenings that regularly rank as my favourites of each year. It's been odd not to have my live audience experience these last two years but I'll try my best to be there for 2022!
The Chase Celebrity Special
(The London Studios, 2016): Booked on a whim shortly before, and showed up early enough to not be turned away as they had far more applicants than they did seats and anyone unlucky got put on a priority list for a future recording. To my delight as a Doctor Who fan, Colin Baker ended up being one of the contestants, along with a comedian, a paralympian (this was aired during the 2016 Paralympics) and someone from Waterloo Road.
I felt incredibly sorry for the audience members who were sitting directly in view behind the camera, as just before filming they awkwardly did some reshuffling, moved them far off camera up to the back and moved down some attractive twenty-something women to fill their place - again this is probably standard but it didn't sit right for me and hadn't affected me or my sixty-something grandma at DOND or Golden Balls a decade earlier who happily kept our front-row seats. Bradley was great fun and very talkative to us, as was 'The Beast' who had lots more to say about the questions and general rules of the show than you normally get on TV.
In a nice touch, if Bradley ever stumbled over a question during the quickfire round, they'd retake that section with some extra seconds added and get the contestant to answer the same right/wrong answers again so they get a fair chance to build up their cash without any fluffs.
Pointless
(Elstree Studios, 2016): As I'd seen The Chase I thought Pointless deserved a go and there were tons available for the regular contestant eps. There's much more of an audience than you see on camera and some rather competitive people were quite insistent about wanting to be on the chairs you see on screen, I was happy being up at the back. Interesting to note that when Richard notes the answers are correct "as of" a certain month, this is most often than not the same month of recording, so it was all "as of July 2016" for these episodes.
Barely no attempt by Alexander and Richard was made to acknowledge the studio audience at all - they walk on, do their takes ("Here is your red line.
Here
is your red line. Ok,
here's
your red line...") and immediately walk off again, which seemed a bit of a shame at first until I realise they record bloody hundreds of these at a time and it would be rather tiring to do that every filming day - at least for The Chase the regular episodes have a canned audience and it's only the celeb ones that have a real one. But we had a really good warm-up bloke who managed the entire audience on his own which was very impressive stuff.
Davina is very nice, pretty much exactly as you see her on screen
