Antiques Road Trip

Synopsis

Daytime (well, technically: "daytime" on BBC Two officially runs up to 7pm, so the 6.30pm slot counts) antiques show stripped across the week. Each week two of the Bargain Hunt/Flog It experts travel around a given region and attempt to "trade up" (which is poncy talk for buying, selling and reinvesting the proceeds). There is a weekly winner, and then all eight return at the end of the series for a final auction to decide the overall champion.

Unlike Bargain Hunt (but like its non-game stablemate Flog It), the show does take the auction house's commission into account, a fact which ultimately makes less difference than you might expect since in general the pieces either win big or lose big, though it does lead to running totals with awkward numbers of odd pence on the end.

All in all, it's a typical daytime antiques buying-and-selling show, nothing terribly out of the ordinary (our mum reckons it's "changed a bit since the last series", which just goes to show how dissimilar to Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Antiques it isn't) but if you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like this. It's certainly less dogged by staged and stilted conversations than most shows of its type (indeed, the free-flowing discussion between the contestants surely has to be the show's biggest selling point), and the money rollover adds a bit of excitement. Just a little bit.

The second series aired in an earlier slot as it was extended to 45 minutes, with the addition of experts-visit-historic-buildings inserts. Interesting though these often are, the best bits of the show are still the interactions between the contestants, which now seem a bit swamped by all the extra(neous) material.

Key moments

In one episode, David Harper paid £100 for what he thought was a Royal Crown Derby 1128 Pattern bowl worth £400, but upon seeing it, his opponent James Lewis immediately identified it as a likely fake. David sent it to Royal Crown Derby, who tested it, declared that it was indeed fake, and impounded it. Luckily David was able to get his money back from the dealer (who, let's face it, could hardly refuse, what with being on telly and all). But that wasn't the end of the drama - when they arrived at the auction, they found out that two of the other items (a Langley pottery frog bought by Lewis and a mid-19th century charger plate purchased by Harper) had been broken because the lowly serf of the production company whose job it was to pack them up for transit hadn't done a very good job. The Bargain Hunt broken items protocol was applied, with both dealers being given the auctioneer's top estimate for the items - which amounted to two rather handsome profits, boosted by the fact that they didn't have to pay commission.

Mark Stacey's talent for getting dealers to give him items for free. Derren Brown would be proud.

Champion

David Harper

Trivia

This was STV's first series commission for the BBC. There is a clue to the show's Caledonian origin in the fact that the experts pay for their purchases using Scottish banknotes.

Music

Lawrence Oakley

Pictures

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