ABSTRACT
Arthur Negus was a British antique furniture expert, who became famous for his tactile affectations when describing pieces on the 1960s British TV programme Going For A Song. The contemporary legacy of this series has been the Antiques Roadshow, which reinvented the fonnat for the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than the rarefied and reverential studio atmosphere of the 1960s, the Antiques Roadshow goes amongst the populace. The experts, however, are often of the same elite as those in the old collecting. Therefore whilst there is a more democratic representation amongst the programme's clientele, those possessing the antiques knowledge have not really changed, the exception being the 'new collecting lines' experts such as Hilary Kaye, which demonstrate the surge of interest in collecting old toys and trinkets. Several weak copy programmes produced for afternoon viewing followed the success of the Antiques Roadshow, such as Going, Going, Gone and a completely revised version of Going For A Song. The more credible Antiques Show on BBC2 has more to offer the general enthusiast, whilst Channel Four's For Love or Money and Arthouse are usually more by way of investigative journalism into art world and antique fraud and gossip. At one end ofthe spectrurn we find BBCl 's The Great Antiques Hunt, which is interactive, in that it requires participants to shrewdly buy and then auction collectables, whilst in London at the other end, a new series, CarBoot Challenge, seeks to do the same thing more cheaply (see Collect 1tl, September 1998). A more successful daytime viewing series, Channel 4's Collector's Lot, combines banal meanderings on scenic settings in 'interesting' houses with some genuinely interesting collections. Carlton Television's The Exchange, which was sponsored by Loot, a free advertisements paper, has come closest to touching on the populist sentiments involved in object attachment (see Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981). This was basically an adult adaptation of a 1980s children's show called Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, in which children exchanged unwanted toys. Participants in The Exchange traded unwanted items for objects of equal value. These varied from cheap ornaments to Doulton character jugs, cars, suits of annour and outdoor model railways.
