NEW YORK NBC studio tour reveals secrets, tricks of TV trade

A studio audience appears larger thanks to strategically placed speakers to amplify the laughter and applause.
By NAEDINE JOY HAZELL
HARTFORD COURANT
NEW YORK -- The NBC studio tour is more sizzle than steak, considering the ticket prices, but it has some tasty morsels.
The 70-minute tour, which can cost $60 or more for a family of four, begins with a flashy video that tells the entire history of NBC in eight minutes, segues into tours of show sets such as "Dateline" and "Saturday Night Live" and ends with something that feels like an ad for high-definition television.
On a tour a few months ago, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer narrated the opening video in the NBC History Theater.
"For over 70 years it's been part of our lives ... the stuff of dreams," the pair tell visitors as scenes flash on the screen from "Hill Street Blues" and "Cheers," of Johnny Carson and Groucho Marx, of "The Monkees" and "I Dream of Jeannie."
The watershed years are mentioned -- NBC went on the air in 1926 ("We were a hit, and the golden age of radio [began]," Couric says), moved to Radio City in 1933, and TV arrived in 1939, only to be sidelined by World War II.
"It is an art that shines like a torch of hope in a troubled world," David Sarnoff says on the history video, as he said when he introduced television in 1939 to a group of curious viewers.
Cheesy set: With those words ringing in their ears, the tour group heads to the set for "Dateline," the news program with Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips. It is a cool, shadowy set that looks somewhat flimsy.
What looks like stainless trim on the show is actually duct tape. The classy-looking wood floor is plywood, lined with markers. The shiny marble is linoleum. What makes the show work is the staff of 400, say the two pages leading the tour, as well as the anchors, who rarely, if ever, tape on the same day.
It's a different story when the show has an audience, as "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" does. Rosie's desk is real, but there's still a certain amount of TV fudging.
You've heard the expression that the camera adds 10 pounds. Imagine what it does to an entire audience. The pages explain that a 177-member audience, such as O'Donnell's, looks like about 500 people on air. The studio staffers do their best to perpetuate that idea by placing speakers under the seats, which feed back audience noise so it sounds like a larger group than it is.
'SNL': The pages next lead the group to NBC's most famous studio, 8H, now home to "Saturday Night Live."
NBC has long had a stable of pages who lead the popular tours. Past pages include Willard Scott, Ted Koppel, Regis Philbin, Steve Allen, Marcy Carsey, Kate Jackson, Michael Eisner and Dave Garroway.
Fans might be disappointed in the SNL studio. It is cluttered with sets, difficult to see from the few rows of baseball stadium seats about a dozen feet above the stage area, and it's rare that tours catch the rehearsals.
Not that many people get to attend a live show, because there are only about 4,000 tickets available and about 250,000 requests each year. The 40 floor-level seats are for visiting VIPs.
The tour ends in the high-definition theater at the store/attraction called the NBC Experience in Rockefeller Plaza. The theater feels like a small IMAX facility, with steep seating, a curved screen and an almost 3D effect.
It seems the right ending for a tour that covers NBC's past and present.