‘The Price Is Right’ Announcer George Gray Admits He Has This Real Problem With Contestants

Brittany Sims June 6, 2025, 11:09 am

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'10,000th Episode' -- Coverage of the CBS Original Series THE PRICE IS RIGHT, scheduled to air on the CBS Television Network. Pictured: George Gray. Photo: Sonja Flemming/CBS ©2025 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved. — Sonja Flemming/CBS

"10,000th Episode" -- Coverage of the CBS Original Series THE PRICE IS RIGHT, scheduled to air on the CBS Television Network. Pictured: George Gray. Photo: Sonja Flemming/CBS ©2025 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The Price Is Right’s George Gray always seems so smooth and perfect at his job. He has been the announcer on the show since 2011, calling out contestants’ names and urging them to “Come on down!”

Now, in an exclusive interview with TV Insider, Gray admits he has a big secret: He’s always messing up contestants’ names, but most viewers at home would never know it.

“If your name’s Andrea, [Ann dreea] I’ll call you Andrea [Awn drea]. If it’s Tara [Tare-a] I’ll call you Tara [Tar-a]. If your last name was Wojaho, I’ll call you Smith. It’s a train wreck,” he confessed.

“I go out in front of the audience and do a little what we call warm-up for a couple moments before we start the show. And I always say, ‘I just want you to be prepared. I’m going to mess up your name. So I will try to do my very best, but I’m going to butcher it, and I’m sorry,'” he admitted.

However, the game show has a secret way to help Gray avoid gaffes. “Every time I say a name, no matter how wrong I say it, there’s somebody on stage that holds up a cue card, and in huge, ginormous letters, is that person’s name, so first and last name. No matter what I do to their name, it’s still there. So that’s, that’s how foolproof we’ve gotten,” The Price Is Right announcer said.

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“Yeah, that happens all the time where, you know, is it Caribbean or Caribbean, right? And I’ll ask the producers, and sometimes they’ll just say ‘tomato tomato. It’s your choice.’ But I know somebody’s gonna go, ‘He’s doing it wrong.’”

gray also revealed a little about how TPIR is filmed. The show airs 195 new episodes a year.

“Back in Bob [Barker]’s day, I believe they shot, I think it was one a day and then two on Thursdays. So we’d have off Friday and be able to golf and have a long weekend. When I came on 15 years ago, we were typically doing two a day, and every rare once in a while, we do three. And now it’s the other way around. We typically do three every once in a while, like if we’re doing a prime-time episode day, or something like that, then we’ll do two. So it sort of depends on how they build the schedule. In theory, we could do it, it could take 195 days. Or we, if you could figure out how to shoot 12 a day, they’d have us out of there in a couple of weeks.”

When they have finished filming for the day Gray, host Drew Carey, the models, and the crew sometimes go out to a bar down the street from the studio and hang out as “one big family.”

Season 53 is winding down as it ends at the end of June, but fans can expect Gray back for 54, as well as some new things. “We start every season with a bang. We always have a new game, so there’ll be a new game. There’ll always be a new fun piece on the set to look at or a different color. We always, mix it up. We actually go back and start our next season at the end of July,” he ended.