Retroselect

With Tim Wonnacott

Addictive fun, which shows you exactly how money is made, and more importantly, not made, in antiques trading. Any fool knows that the way to make money in the modern world is to buy post war collectables at boot fairs, and then sell them on eBay. But this is the BBC, so we buy traditional antiques at retail price in a fair, then sell them at trade price in a seedy provincial auction house! Guaranteed to fail, of course! Good to see that it now has a 50 minute slot. This show has high ratings and will continue, whereas the David Dickinson version (see below) has been put out of its misery. At first sight, Tim Wonnacott looks like an Antiques Roadshow dinosaur, which to some extent he is. However, you can't help warming to him because he is so engaging and natural, and has great people skills. He is also an incredibly fluent and articulate talker, with slightly off-beat phrasing which makes him fun to listen to. He also comes across as being a nice person. His dentist has asked to remain anonymous.

Compelling entertainment

This show has nothing to do with bargains, because none are ever found. Instead, it is a show about overvaluation by experts who are out of their depth, and this is what makes it so enjoyable (maybe Mark Franks could join the team, because he would be in his element).

The contestants are ordinary punters whose mission is to find 3 bargain collectables at a flea market - with only one hour to do so. Mission impossible, of course. It then gets even more cruel, because the punters have to sell their pieces of overpriced crap at a seedy provincial auction house. They nearly always lose lots of money because they are buying at retail price at the fair, then selling at trade price at the auction. It is the equivalent of buying something at Harrods and then trying to sell it in Peckham Market for a profit.

Favourite purchases are: damaged china, chipped glass, fakes and reproductions, and things that are utterly useless and unsaleable, such as mahogany glove-stretchers, Georgian ivory-plated shirt-lifters, rusty prams, and crudely carved wooden ashtrays from Bavaria (with burn marks).

The experts are dealers who apparently spend their working lives in seedy provincial auction houses. This makes it all the more fun, because the dealers have obviously never been within 100 miles of a flea market in their lives - and consistently overvalue the objects by a factor of 2 or 3.

The viewers are in on this joke, and while the expert is singing the praises of the hand-carved Edwardian tonsil-depressors (damaged) that the contestants have just bought for 180 pounds, we all know that their true market value is considerably less, and another auction disaster is in the making.

To intensify the humiliation of the punters, their objects are shown to the auctioneer before the sale. You can just see the look of disgust on the faces of the snooty, out-of-touch auctioneers if anything retro is laid out before them.

Overpriced goods

One strange feature of this show is that we never see the dealers from whom the contestants buy their 'bargains'. Do the dealers perhaps ask to remain anonymous - ashamed of being identified as purveyors of overpriced dross?

Tim is a real decorative arts expert, and obviously finds the bargains on show a bit downmarket. Indeed he can barely conceal his disgust with what the contestants find. So he usually dashes off to a posh country house in the interval to show us some proper upmarket antiques; or, more interestingly, he gives his own expert opinions on some of the better pieces on sale at the fleamarket, if he can find any, or the auction. Some of the best moments come when we see Tim's picks being auctioned, and it soon becomes obvious that he knows what he is talking about.

Badly-staged cameos

The show is sometimes spoiled by cheesy direction. The problem is not the scripts - which aren't too bad, and certainly not as pun-ridden as those of Flog it!. No, the real problem are the incredibly badly-staged scenes where the poor contestants are forced to act natural, while reading from scripts; or where Tim does clumsily-directed 'humorous' interludes with the experts. All rather wooden and embarrassing - rather like an Acorn Antiques parody of bad production and second-rate acting.