Episode 13 Priceless Antiques Roadshow

Since I began working on the Roadshow, I look more closely at how things were made.

Look at the workmanship on these 18th century mahogany and boxwood chairs for example.

Two of our furniture men, John Bly and Christopher Payne

will find out exactly what's involved as they try to learn the tricks of the trade.

Yes, this is an action-packed edition.

Our researchers have been busy mining for more nuggets

from over 500 hours of our archives.

They found some of the most extraordinary finds

ever uncovered at Roadshows.

They're worth nothing.

But when we look into them,

we can give you another valuation which is that they're priceless.

Ceramics expert Will Farmer

remembers his first time in front of the cameras.

I always said to parents and to grandparents,

"One day I'm going to try and get on it.

"I don't know how I'm going to!"

And not everyone's dreams come true

when it comes to the valuation moment.

My goodness!

After all those years!

Every now and then, a piece turns up that brings out the groupie in our experts.

When a piece turns up that's been touched by the stars,

our experts love rolling out the red carpet

to give the celebrity treatment.

When somebody comes with a collection of rock and pop memorabilia,

of course, immediately you go back to when you first heard, or saw,

or were involved in that particular band.

# Metal Guru Is it you... #

If I didn't know better,

I'd think I was here with Marc Bolan

because you are incredibly alike.

-Thank you.

-Stature wise, in every way.

Loads of diehard music fans come to the Roadshow,

and they bring a whole raft of different kinds of memorabilia.

The ultimate item that fans would want, high up on the list,

would be an instrument or something that they'd worn.

These fabulous dungarees, I think I recognise those.

Yeah, Marc used to wear these quite often.

These ones in particular are famous on Top Of The Pops.

He performed a song called Metal Guru in them.

He used to have "T Rex" in sequins

and through the years, they've fallen off.

And what else have we got here? This looks pretty full-on.

Yeah, this is the original master

of the two-inch multi-track of 20th Century Boy.

The only one in the world.

-May I lift the lid?

-Yeah, it's in acid-free paper, of course.

Pretty good, eh?

It was a tricky moment when I had the box that held the tape.

Should I unpack it, should I not?

I don't know, no, I won't take it out.

The crowd around me were really egging me on.

Oh, go on! You're egging me on!

So, yeah, I unpacked it.

There we go, two-inch recording tape.

You don't see much of that these days.

No. Japanese technology as well, back in 1972 when it was recorded.

It was released in 1973,

20th Century Boy, but he actually recorded that when he was in Japan.

If you put that on a tape deck now,

it sounds perfect, like it was recorded yesterday.

You feel as if he's right there.

I've been in the studio listening to that,

it's like Marc is there with you.

It's this kind of material that I find really difficult to value.

I'd have said somewhere between £5000 and £10,000

is where I would put the value for that.

They don't care what it's worth.

They're just so thrilled to have something

that was owned or worn by, or signed by their idol.

Value is meaningless.

Of course, anything that belonged to anybody famous

immediately has that "X factor" attached to it,

and I suppose the Beatles are still the band

that create the highest amount of fervour.

So, what makes you think this is John Lennon's lavatory?

Um, we saw it advertised

in a music magazine

by a guy who dealt in architectural antiques

and he was dealing with some of the items coming from Tittenhurst Park,

which is John Lennon's former home.

-Have you used it yet?

-No, no.

That's essential, I think.

Our friends have had photographs taken whilst actually sitting on it.

-OK. What did you pay for it?

-We paid at the time just over £500.

I think you got a bargain and an antique of the future.

There are conventional ways to bond with your idol,

usually just getting an autograph.

"Be all right with the freak and funky, Jimi Hendrix."

What a classic line!

It's in an autograph book

with bits of Mitch Mitchell's drumsticks as well,

Jimi Hendrix's drummer.

How do you happen to have these?

We just went to see Jimi.

It was April 1967.

We were waiting outside on the stage door, me and my friend.

A bit of drama occurred because someone stole his guitar

as it was being loaded onto the bus for them to go home.

This person ran up the street. We ran up, following Jimi.

-You gave pursuit after Jimi Hendrix's guitar?

-Yeah.

As a kind of reward

for "helping", in inverted commas, to catch the man,

Hendrix handed over this tiny ring.

-That's Jimi Hendrix's ring?

-Yes.

-So he gave you that?

-Yeah.

-It looks like something out of a Christmas cracker.

-I know!

When someone puts an object in front of you and says, "This belonged to Jimi Hendrix,"

of course the first thing you are going to think is,

"Right, this has got to be qualified.

"I've got to be sure that this is correct."

# I gotta get out of here as fast as I can... #

And sometimes the stories are just so right, they are so there

straight away that you know you don't have to question them.

Hold on, a sec. I've got to wear it.

It was just like him, he was a flamboyant.

I'm quite flamboyant as well. Does it suit me?

No, actually it's a bit small for me.

It fits on my little finger. It's a Christmas cracker ring but at the end of the day,

it's not quality that's important here, is it?

I looked at it and I thought, this ring was worn by Jimi Hendrix

and not only that, several of my colleagues put it on as well

because putting on an object like that...is strange.

You cannot describe it.

There's a little bit more to it than an average autograph page.

-I think the whole lot is going to make £500 to £700 at auction.

-Yeah.

But there's one star that shines brighter than any other

and that's a Hollywood star.

I bought it some years ago at a jewellery sale in a hotel in Scotland

where my husband and I used to go quite a lot.

It also belonged to a very beautiful woman, Ingrid Bergman.

Oh, how marvellous.

An actress whom I admired, I've seen most of her films.

That one was particularly interesting for me

because I did see Ingrid Bergman when I was very young

in London and spoke to her for a short while where I work.

So it was particularly evocative to me and I remember that meeting very well.

It's evocative to everybody, she was a luminously famous,

beautiful creature and my father was hopelessly in love with her.

She was a byword for grace and beauty.

This is a spectacularly tasteful brooch, isn't it? Do you wear it?

Thank you. Yes, I do, to the right occasion.

-Not a lot.

-No.

I'm very proud to wear it and I love wearing it.

It was very, very impressive to me to find this thing

and perhaps when a diamond and pearl jewel of that nature that you know

is worn by a very famous person, then it adds value enormously to it.

What I'd like to know,

is there any way of finding out, is whether she ever wore it in a film

or is there a photograph of her wearing it?

I'm sure there will be a photograph. That would be very satisfying

and would help the value enormously.

I don't really hesitate from valuing that at something like £15,000 today.

My word. It's quite a lot more than I paid for it.

And I do love pearls.

Well, pearls and diamonds, it's a very subtle combination.

I must say it suits you very well and I'm so thrilled to see it.

After that item went out,

eagle-eyed viewers found a photo with Ingrid Bergman wearing

just that brooch, which pinned down the celebrity provenance.

Our next guest is no stranger to star items,

having sold celebrity collections in his day job as an auctioneer.

Will Farmer is one of our younger ceramics specialists

but we like to think he came of age when he first stepped in front

of our cameras four years ago, a day he remembers well.

My first ever show I vividly remember was the children's Roadshow.

Meet the next generation.

This young girl had come and sat down with me and she unfolded

this collection of Beswick and she was responsive and excited.

I just thought, right, let's go for this. We've got to have a go.

My great granny on my mum's side died and she collected them

as soon as they first came out

and she gave them to my mum and my mum gave them to me.

Now, the Beatrix Potter range were basically instigated

by a lady called Lucy Beswick.

I was spoon-fed antics literally from cradle

and as my mum says, "You are a cradle to graver."

She said, "You'll do nothing but antiques."

That mixed in with fairly precocious child

who liked going on stage and being in musicals and singing and doing plays.

Always joked, always sort of said to parents and to grandparents,

"One day I'm going to try and get on it.

"I don't know how I'm going to do it."

Everybody wanted to own Jemima Puddle Duck

and Benjamin Bunny and Pigling Bland.

'The recording side of it didn't bother me.'

It was about the fun of just being there.

Duchess is at the top of the table because she's at the top of the tree.

Out of all your collection, if you had to go and get another Duchess

and buy her at a fair,

you would probably have to part with the best part of £1,500 to £2,000.

Wow! I'll keep her then.

I really remember the one distinctive thing which was that Christmas

cos it was the Boxing Day show

and I had sort of hesitantly forewarned the family

that it could be shown so we were in the living room watching the telly

and there was this overhead shot with all the animals on it and my voice.

Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, they're all here, aren't they?

And I was like, "Ah!"

And the whole room, everybody was just like, "Ah!"

There was that classic thing which I'm sure happens to everyone

the first time they're on telly, the phone's going, "You're on telly!"

"Yes, we know." It was amazing.

Really quite an amazing thing.

Will Farmer, a man who knows his Susie Cooper from his Clarice Cliff.

Our furniture experts have taken a lifetime to gather their knowledge

but even they regularly come across new skills and techniques

used in the making of antique furniture,

which gave us an idea.

Two of our top specialists are John Bly and Christopher Payne.

Between them, they've done over 50 years on the Roadshow.

Palpitations over good parquetry...

Look at this, isn't this splendid?

I think I could probably play for hours with this.

..and delirious over dovetails.

Oh, look at those. Look at the colours!

Can you believe it?

Having admired the craftsmanship for so long,

can they make it themselves?

Wanting to find out, we sent them back to school at West Dean College.

Do you think that in 100 years' time, somebody's going to find these pieces?

Yes, we'll sign them. They'll be rather good.

John Payne and Christopher Bly. Let's confuse everybody, historians.

We wanted to see how far they could get in making

a seventeenth-century joint stool in a day.

-Guiding them from stump to stool will be Mike.

-All right, lads.

This is what we're up to today.

A 17th century joint stool,

out of ash and oak.

Joints to cut, timber to shape.

That's quite a lot of work.

The name is a corruption of joined school

and it describes the first type of seating

that was joined together, rather than being nailed together.

Mind the fingers.

-Don't hit it too hard, either.

-Oh!

'I suspect we'll be taken right back to basics.'

I don't suppose in a day we'll get

the experience that an apprentice had over seven years in the 18th century

but we'll see how far we get.

In here, I'll use a fro.

Once it gets into the timber, it's pushed to and fro.

And thence the name!

It's difficult to realise how different this could be

from the Antiques Roadshow. We stand or sit at a table,

I walk around looking at furniture, but here I'm trying to make something.

All those years of experience and criticism are down to zero.

Look at that!

-Excellent.

-Very good!

I think it's a great opportunity to actually get back

into making something.

Feeling the wood again.

-Oh, that is so good, isn't it?

-Isn't that nice?

Old ways work best!

My family business, antique dealers, was started by my grandfather,

who was the first one in the family to take

an academic interest in old furniture in 1891.

The family had been dealers in Tring, where I live, since 1820.

I like taking corners off.

You've got to make it square, John.

-It has to be square eventually!

-I was going to have a rounded one.

We've got to use that for a leg, you can't nick away at the edges.

I suppose cabinet-making was also part of my in my life because

I was born behind the shop and in a workshop

so I can cut a joint but it's a long time since I did.

We're just about there. That's just about square.

Now, we'll take this into the workshop to plane it a bit more

and then it's gonna become a leg.

Now, we're going to be rough planing to start with.

-Right.

-I'll stand back.

I was in my grandfather's workshops, aged four.

I was given this saw and I was taught to saw.

-Quite ferocious.

-It's a biter!

-Attacking it.

I used to cut bits of doweling and things like that and

I've always had the smell of sawdust in my nostrils, if you like.

-Keep your fingers out of the way, John.

-I will.

I went on, I graduated to make this box which

I don't think I'm particularly proud of but I was nine.

It's not very square. My name written in.

Not dated, I think about 1958.

An antique of the future for the Antiques Roadshow.

No electric tools here. We wanted to make Chris and John's

experience as close to a 17th century carpenter's as possible.

Tell you one thing, John, it's...oh!

You see a mortise and tenon joint now,

you'll have some respect for it, Christopher.

It's much more difficult than I thought.

There's nothing quite so beautiful and tactile

as feeling a chisel go through across the grain on a piece of wood.

You can feel the life in the tree. It's terrific.

It's something indescribable until you to do it and once

you've done it, you want to do it again.

I can see we'll look at furniture on the Roadshow in future

with, not quite a microscope, but a loop like the jewellery boys have.

Yes. We might even turn up with a bag of tools.

They've been at it for a few hours now

and time's running out for Chris and John to complete their stools.

-Look, what a dream.

-Lucky we're not being paid by the hour for this.

It would be a very expensive stool.

There's just enough time to peg the stool frame.

Now we have a nice, round pin,

just the size we want to go into the joint.

-Let's have an inspection.

-Oh, yes, it looks just right.

The day is over and although they haven't finished their stools,

they did pretty well.

It's amazing what you two have done today.

-Looks like we've fallen between two stools, I think.

-Oh, dear!

This has taught me an awful lot really.

Firstly, the work that goes into it, the time it takes

to make a fairly simple stool like this is quite an effort, isn't it?

What it's done for me is to renew my respect

for 17th and 18th century cabinet-makers.

We forget all the things that we're looking at, how skilled they were

and that's been wonderful and actually to make a frame up

has been very rewarding.

What's going to be such fun is when I'm next on Antiques Roadshow

with John, we'll be fighting for the joint stool to talk about it.

We'll bore for England but it'll be great fun. What a great day!

John Bly and Christopher Payne on a steep learning curve.

Every Roadshow has at least one object that seems to stand out

for our audience and it's not always the object that's worth the most.

Every now and then, it's something which

doesn't have much financial value but has enormous emotional impact.

Most people think the Roadshow is all about high-value extreme rarity

but to me, these are just as interesting.

I remember a lady at Swansea who came and sat down at my table

and she brought out a carrier bag with all sorts of bits of ephemera,

which is paperwork in other words, and it related to a soldier

who had gone missing in India at the beginning of the 20th century.

This is a relative of yours?

Yes, it was my grandmother's brother

and he was a soldier during the First World War

and was sent out to India where he never came back from,

but he wasn't killed in action,

he just disappeared there.

What do you mean disappeared?

Well, from the letters and the things that have come back,

it seems he'd had enough and walked out one day.

-Good Lord! And never turned up?

-Never turned up.

And with it was his diary.

-And it says, "Made great mistake... which means a lot."

-That's right.

Clearly, he'd done something terrible and he absconded.

He walked off, walked away. And they never heard or saw from him again

and that to me, actually, it brought a tear to my eye, I have to say.

My grandmother spent a long time hoping he'd turn up.

When the troop ships were coming back,

because they lived just outside Swansea at that time,

she'd go down to meet the troops.

His sister stood at the dockside day after day after day,

as the ships came back with all the soldiers,

hoping that he would be one of those coming down the gangplank

but he never did, he never returned.

In the history of the world, it's an insignificant problem

but to the individual and to the family,

it's one of the greatest tragedies that could ever happen.

The First and Second World Wars were times of enormous loss and tragedy.

Such periods often produce very powerful objects associated with them.

What you've brought me here is a portfolio of lithos,

of lithographic prints by this artist, Henri Pieck,

of views of Buchenwald, the concentration camp.

The Buchenwald drawings were brought in by a young girl whose mother

had found them in a charity shop. What a story!

I thought very, very strongly that although they were horrific images,

showing what that life was like, I thought,

"We have to do this. We have to address difficult subjects."

Let's start at the beginning,

printed in Holland, Dutch artist.

The most important thing is that he spent

quite a long time in a concentration camp,

presumably Buchenwald, because he was a communist.

The Holocaust was not just about

what was done to the Jews in the Final Solution,

it was about Communists, it was about people with mental difficulties,

it was about gypsies, it was about a whole host of people

who were unacceptable to the Third Reich.

How did you feel when you saw these?

They're just very emotive and you look at them and for me,

there's no personal attachment to them but I look at them

and think it's just desperate. They are desperate.

I think what they reveal is, as you say,

the sheer desperation of life in the camp.

If you weren't killed, if you didn't die,

this is how you looked. I just think they're such powerful records

of a time which we are in danger of forgetting.

We have to accept

that we have done terrible things

and we mustn't forget it. Forget the value, they're powerful,

they're emotive as you say, they're our history.

It's very rare that an object has an actual imprint of history upon it

but at Norwich Cathedral, some were brought in that bore

the scars of a monumental tragedy.

A man brings in a box containing two broken and glued dishes.

I looked at these and I thought, "Ah, I know where these are from."

You tell me.

Well, my father picked them up during the war

when he was in Hiroshima.

He went to pick survivors and prisoners of war up.

He went to Hiroshima and picked these pots up.

-What was your father doing there?

-He was in the medical corps.

-That was his job was in the army.

-Did he talk about what he saw?

Not at all.

-It must have affected him.

-I think it did, yes.

It did affect him. He hardly went out of Norfolk once he got home.

-So it did affect him.

-Your father may not have spoken about Hiroshima

but these bowls do.

'Picking up those bowls,

'you could feel your way back to 1945.'

The human brain is wired to think

that objects can communicate and they do.

I can tell you that to get a glaze to run on a piece of porcelain,

you've got to take the temperature up to 1,300 and beyond.

'1,300 degrees centigrade.'

This little bowl, which was a very modest piece of Japanese porcelain,

went through a second firing. That's how hot it got.

The temperature, even six miles outside Hiroshima,

went up to 1,300 degrees centigrade.

And over.

And that's why you have these globules of glaze,

as the thing began to run for the second time.

We're looking at a little piece of

fossilised history

which, when you begin to look into it, tells you just how horrific

a nuclear bomb going off is.

That, for me,

epitomises the power of a modest object.

Something we may just biff away and you know the story behind it.

So, when you bring two ordinary, destroyed,

frankly ugly little broken pots, they are worth nothing.

But when we look into them,

we can give you another valuation which is that they're priceless.

Some memorable Roadshow finds

that speak more powerfully than mere money. Join us tomorrow,

when we try to answer the almost impossible question

of what's been the most beautiful item ever seen at a Roadshow.

It was beautiful, it was subtle,

it was well made and I've never forgotten it.

All these years, my mind will always go to that piece.

And when is an antique not an antique?

A question that's caused some controversy.

It should not include, basically

the massed produced junk that came out of the 20th century.

There is no reason for that.

Before we go, you may be thinking that everyone who attends a Roadshow

leaves with a pleasant tingle of excitement

about their meeting with an expert. Sadly, it's not always the case.

We turn the clock back to a visit to Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland,

as Tim Wonnacott is about to value this man's lifetime's treasure.

From a ship's fitting, whether it's a cross channel ferry or a liner

or whatever, and people buy marine artefacts and that's what this is.

So, the steward would fill the copper reservoir with water.

You whizz open, wow,

the wash hand basin which would be filled

by pressing this little nickel tap.

You'd have you wash and when you've had your wash...

Whoosh - it disgorges the waste into a galvanised container on the back

and when that needs to be disgorged,

you undo the bottom flap and take out this fellow.

When it's full, you chuck it overboard.

Where did you get it from?

I went to an auction, you understand?

It was antiques at this auction.

That's why it was so expensive.

Did you have to pay a lot?

Well, I paid £52 in old currency.

-In the 1950s?

-Yes.

-52 old pounds?

-Yes.

-Gosh, that was a price!

If you were selling it at auction, in a marine sale,

I think you could get between £200 to £300 for it.

-Is that all?

-Yeah. That's all.

My goodness, after all those years!

Keeping anything myself for 50 years.

I can only get £400.

£400 top end.

I never heard the like.

Until next time, bye-bye.

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