Antiques Road Trip: Why its a vintage period for antiques on television

By Olly Grant Published: 4:22PM GMT 03 March 2010

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Experts David Barby and Anita Manning buy antiques during their highway outing transport from Aberdeen to Yorkshire to sell at auction in BBC2"s Antiques Road Trip. Photo: BBC

Is there a radio format some-more devoted than the really old show? In a landscape dirty with the carcasses of once-mighty TV formulas (remember the Nineties practice for grassed area makeovers), antiques are the idealisation survivors.

Consider Antiques Roadshow: 31 years old, and nonetheless right away the most-watched array on BBC One after EastEnders and Lark Rise to Candleford (it gets over 7 million viewers a week). Or crack by the daytime schedules, where the Roadshows auction residence children power supreme, and with ever some-more resourceful titles: Flog It, Bargain Hunt, Cash in the Attic, Dickinsons Real Deal, Trust Me, Im a Dealer...

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Next week sees a new fake to the crown: Antiques Road Trip on BBC Two. Think of it as auctions and wheels, says David Barby, a TV maestro who stars in the seriess initial five episodes. "Its really identical in format to Bargain Hunt, where the contestants are given income and sent off to buy antiques," he explains.

Except that, this time, the experts are the contestants. So, in week one (the show runs every day from Monday to Friday), Barby will go head-to-head with associate pundit Anita Manning (who in an additional guise runs Great Western Auctions in Glasgow; she was Scotlands initial ever womanlike auctioneer). Equipped with �200 every and a robust red sports car, they contingency transport from Aberdeen to Yorkshire, purchasing antiques in shops along the way, afterwards try to grow the kitties by offered their buys at auction. Their end-of-week tallies afterwards go brazen to a grand last in a months time, to be contested by experts from the stirring weekly shows.

From a producers point of view, it has the scattergun sniff of might about it: a every night narrative, a hold of the good British outdoors, and maybe a small schadenfreude when the experts flop. "I attempted to keep seeking ladylike, but I was scarcely in floods after the initial day," says Manning, whose early purchases take a pulsation at auction.

Both experts proposed their careers as penetrating childhood collectors Barby with porcelain dogs and Manning by furloughed auctions with her father and Barby believes the "peculiar British trait" of squirrelling partly explains the peculiar passion for antiques, on and off screen.

"We are healthy hoarders," he smiles. "I recollect my father stockpiling sugarine during the Suez Crisis; I think he believed World War III was entrance and only longed for something to discount with. It might well be that people similar to to pick up for that reason, as a kind of apparatus to tumble behind on."

Britain, of course, has prolonged supposing fruitful dirt for such trinkets. No invading armed forces ever carried off the precious porcelain dogs, whilst Victorian expansionism drew serve cache to the Empires bosom. But it was the sole inhabitant might to realize that old things and astonishing income and pristine curiosity (what do the Joneses keep in their attic?) would next to riveting telly.

Antiques Roadshow began in 1979 and has sole to sixteen worldwide territories, from Bahrain to Japan, Norway and East Africa. Australians are outrageous fans; BBC Worldwides Aussie arm sells some-more hours of it there than any alternative series.

It has additionally been deftly reconfigured for internal markets. In Finland, punters mental condition of fortunes on Antiikkia, Antiikkia; in Sweden, Antikrundan not long ago distinguished the 20th anniversary.

America has the own version, too, but the UK show, promote on BBC America given 2005, has additionally garnered fans a little of them utterly famous. Harrison Ford not long ago dismayed a Radio Times contributor by announcing that Antiques Roadshow was a Ford favourite: he and Calista Flockhart, his singer wife, similar to to watch it whilst eating pancakes.

Other British auction formats are renouned too: "I was in Guernsey not long ago with my mother and beheld a Dutch integrate hovering nearby," recalls Barby. "Eventually they came over and said, Are you on Bargain Hunt? They thought it was the bees knees. Ive even had Yuletide cards."

Manning thinks TVs love event with antiques is doubtful to decline - notwithstanding a BBC guarantee this week to modernise the daytime schedules - especially since longevity is what draws us to them in the initial place.

"The past gives us a feeling of security and warmth, and I think thats growing," she says. "I see so most immature people at auctions now. Theyre theme to conform and fad, of course, similar to everybody else. But when you buy something from the past, you know it has stood the exam of time, and that it will last in to the future."

Antiques Road Trip starts on Monday on BBC Two at 6.30pm