As I mentioned in my last post, I enjoy watching Antiques Roadshow. But only the American version.
This will be high treason to certain friends of mine, but I detest the original, British version. Everyone bringing objects to the appraisers in Britain has evidently been told that showing the slightest hint of emotion will instantly cut the value of their object by nine tenths. Fifty pounds, ten thousand pounds, it's all the same to these people.All of the enthusiasm just gets leached out of the show. You're left with items, some of them admittedly quite interesting, none of them worth half as much as you think they should be.
The American version, by contrast, has a whole whack of emotion: shock ("How much did you say this thing's worth? Really?? Wow!"); joy (some people act as if they've just put in a winning bid for a fabulous showcase on The Price Is Right); even dismay, when the unwitting dupe is told he's been had, that the $10,000 artifact he has worshipped for years is really a $100 fake.
Some of the items that come up on the American Roadshow are amazing in and of themselves. The original "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter. I was stunned to find out it had a value of only $35,000.That letter is known worldwide. You'd think it'd be double that, at least.
I always have fun trying to guess the value of each object. I'm often awaaaaaaay off. I have formulated Antiques Roadshow rules, but I often forget them. That I might remember them in a moment of heated appraisal, here they be:

1) The uglier the vase, the more it's worth.
2) In most cases, age has absoluely nothing to do with value. I have seen artifacts from before Christ valued at a couple of thousand dollars.
3) Jewellery is seldom worth more than an equivalent weight in gold.
4) Many objects seem to appreciate at exactly the rate of inflation.
5) A perfectly ordinary item can instantly quintuple in value if it can be proven that somebody Important once looked at it. I've NEVER understood this principle, but it is universal.

The other thing I enjoy about Antiques Roadshow is watching the appraisers strut their stuff. "This handkerchief was manufactured on the third floor of 436 East Knowitall Avenue in Smartypants, New Jersey, on August 8th, 1842. The factory was owned by Abraham Lincoln's third cousin's servant's illegitimate son. If you look on the upper left you can just make out a petrified piece of snot blown from the nose of Lord Hottootrot in 1875. This raises the value of the handkerchief. Unfortunately, it looks as though an ordinary Bic lighter has burned away this portion here in the lower right. I think it was a blue lighter, though it could possibly have been more of a teal colour. If that lighter had been one of the rare chartruese ones, we could safely estimate the value of this handkerchief to be $2000. Instead, it's only worth about $1700."
You can't help but shiver in the wake of such arcane knowledge so confidently blurted out.

Iamagine my excitement when I heard there was going to be a Canadian Antiques Roadshow. Great, I thought. Now we'll see what kind of things are scuttling around the objects of people I might actually know.
Not much, as it turns out.
With the exception of one painting valued at half a million Canadian dollars, most everything I have seen to date was trifling, and some of the things are damn near worthless. To hear an appraiser profile something at length and then come out with a figure of $300 (and that in deflated Canadian currency, no less!) is to wince and sigh and reach for the remote. Also, these appraisers don't seem to know much at all. "This plate, it's English, it's worth about $500" is all the information the viewer gets, sometimes.
And Valerie Pringle! Can somebody slip some downers into her coffee, please? A manic person would tell her to chill out a bit. Her voice is so gratingly cheerful that it actually hurts my ear.
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For those of you awaiting my take on the federal budget, never fear. I will digest it tomorrow and spew forth my observations.
Bye for now.