Why it’s a vintage period for UK antiques on television

Is there a television format more tenacious than the antique show? In a landscape littered with the carcasses of once-mighty TV formulas (remember the Nineties vogue for garden makeovers), antiques are the ultimate survivors. Consider Antiques Roadshow: 31 years old, and yet currently the most-watched series on BBC One after EastEnders and Lark Rise to Candleford (it gets over 7 million viewers a week). Or flick through the daytime schedules, where the Roadshow’s auction house progeny reign supreme, and with ever more inventive titles: Flog It, Bargain Hunt, Cash in the Attic, Dickinson’s Real Deal, Trust Me, I’m a Dealer... Next week sees a new pretender to the crown: Antiques Road Trip on BBC Two. Think of it as auctions plus wheels, says David Barby, a TV veteran who stars in the series’s first five episodes. “It’s very similar in format to Bargain Hunt, where the contestants are given money and sent off to buy antiques,” he explains. Except that, this time, the experts are the contestants. So, in week one (the show runs daily from Monday to Friday), Barby will go head-to-head with fellow pundit Anita Manning (who in another guise runs Great Western Auctions in Glasgow; she was Scotland’s first ever female auctioneer). Equipped with £200 apiece and a jaunty red sports car, they must travel from Aberdeen to Yorkshire, purchasing antiques in shops along the way, then try to grow the kitties by selling their buys at auction. Their end-of-week tallies then go forward to a grand final in a month’s time, to be contested by experts from the forthcoming weekly shows. From a producer’s point of view, it has the scattergun whiff of genius about it: a nightly narrative, a touch of the great British outdoors, and perhaps a little schadenfreude when the experts flop. “I tried to keep looking ladylike, but I was nearly in floods after the first day,” says Manning, whose early purchases take a pounding at auction. Both experts started their careers as keen childhood collectors – Barby with porcelain dogs and Manning by touring auctions with her father – and Barby believes the “peculiar British trait” of squirrelling partly explains our odd passion for antiques, on and off screen. “We are natural hoarders,” he smiles. “I remember my father stockpiling sugar during the Suez Crisis; I think he believed World War III was coming and just wanted something to bargain with. It may well be that people like to collect for that reason, as a kind of resource to fall back on.” Britain, of course, has long provided fertile soil for such trinkets. No invading army ever carried off our priceless porcelain dogs, while Victorian expansionism drew further riches to the Empire’s bosom. But it was our particular national genius to realise that old stuff plus unexpected income plus pure nosiness (what do the Joneses keep in their attic?) would equal riveting telly. Antiques Roadshow began in 1979 and has sold to 16 worldwide territories, from Bahrain to Japan, Norway and East Africa. Australians are huge fans; BBC Worldwide’s Aussie arm sells more hours of it there than any other series. It has also been cleverly reconfigured for local markets. In Finland, punters dream of fortunes on Antiikkia, Antiikkia; in Sweden, Antikrundan recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. America has its own version, too, but the UK show, broadcast on BBC America since 2005, has also garnered fans – some of them quite famous. Harrison Ford recently startled a Radio Times reporter by announcing that Antiques Roadshow was a Ford favourite: he and Calista Flockhart, his actress wife, like to watch it while eating pancakes. Other British auction formats are popular too: “I was in Guernsey recently with my wife and noticed a Dutch couple hovering nearby,” recalls Barby. “Eventually they came over and said, ‘Are you on Bargain Hunt?’ They thought it was the bees’ knees. I’ve even had Christmas cards.” Manning thinks TV’s love affair with antiques is unlikely to wane - despite a BBC promise this week to refresh its daytime schedules - mainly because longevity is what draws us to them in the first place. “The past gives us a feeling of security and warmth, and I think that’s growing,” she says. “I see so many young people at auctions now. They’re subject to fashion and fad, of course, like everyone else. But when you buy something from the past, you know it has stood the test of time, and that it will last into the future.” Source www.telegraph.co.uk