Oldie but a Goodie: Antiques Roadshow Live Report
Our view of the Sunday night telly staple as it rocks up to Dartington Hall.
The Antiques Roadshow, I inform my sullen, sunburnt kids, is a British institution. An oldie but a goodie. A cheerful relic of that prehistoric era when we all sat down after Sunday lunch to watch the same convex screen, secretly bored off our collective tits. And it’s here, at Dartington Hall! Aren’t we blessed. It’s still a gripping format. People bring their tat, and occasionally their treasure, to be sized up by a phalanx of gimlet-eyed appraisers, all minor celebs in their own right. Presiding over it all? Fiona Bruce, serene as a duchess, brisk as a headmistress – uncannily adept at making a walnut sideboard fascinating for five minutes.
Full disclosure, I’ve had a crush on Fiona Bruce nigh on 20 years, from back when she hosted the BBC evening bulletin. It’s a running joke among my friends, one of whom presented me with a framed autograph of her for Christmas. The nation’s foremost news-siren.
My wife, pre-loading on Pimms, was naturally thrilled. English-Rose-maxxing in a pretty dress, dancing to Jazzient at the Green Table Café before our slot. The long queue in was all brittle gentility, everyone slyly eyeing up each other’s canvas bags for clues about the loot. My core insight? Antiques Roadshow is a gas, and everybody should go, if you get the chance, especially on such a peach of a summer afternoon. It’s so deeply, profoundly English: the interminable queueing, the fancy dogs, cackling poshos in cream hats and floral frocks. And, of course, the disappointment.
Yes, disappointment. The highlight of this show is emphatically not when some old dear becomes an overnight millionairess after finding a gravy boat in a skip.
Nope, it’s this. Some luckless lady brings her shiny belt all the way down to Dartington – on one of the non-televised tables, can you imagine – explaining how hubby bought it for her in New York in the seventies. How much did he pay? “I dunno. Three hundred and fifty dollars?”. The expert idly fingers the brocade, and, barely looking up, dismisses her with a gruff “hundred quid?” before moving swiftly on.
Her crestfallen expression! Ha! We plebs shuffling in the background exchange guilty smirks.
Mean? Perhaps. But it’s the beating heart of the format. Think of Antiques Roadshow’s many spin-offs — Bargain Hunt, Cash in the Attic. It’s all money, money, money. Filthy lucre, expectations and aspirations thereof. Class envy. Antique curiosity runs a distant second. There’s cool stuff to see, in any case. A rare portrait by J M Barrie’s favourite illustrator. A Romano-British oil lamp being turned over in Fiona Bruce’s elegant patrician fingers. A Mackintosh vase worth – we all lean in for the Big Number – two grand. Most satisfactory.
Who are the punters? A fun lot. I catch one sixty-something furtively sneaking out a portaloo in a plume of Benson and Hedges smoke. Absolute queen.
My mate who works at Riverford brings along a Bakelite bed warmer his grandfather apparently invented — he should be on the broadcast in August, so watch out for that. All the great and good of Totnes in their Sunday best, hogging the iconic AR deckchairs and soaking up the sunshine. Nevertheless, riding Bob The Bus down the hill, I find myself wondering: isn’t it all a teensy bit tawdry? Attaching cash value to such treasures? That well-heeled woman in the shiny belt will carry that shameful appraisal with her forever. I bet she seldom wears it again.
Meanwhile the Antiques Roadshow panel, led by that vixen Bruce, moves on to the next town, countless more dreams to blithely shatter – hoping nobody tuning in realises how they seem to know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.