I have only recently begun to watch Antiques Roadshow with any real regularity. Before that I would catch a snippet now and then while surfing past PBS.
It seemed to me that in my snippet-watching days there were a lot more klunkers featured: worthless junk, reproductions, and frauds. I used to love those segments because I found them even more informative and entertaining than the ones that had the valuable finds. Plus, you got the sense that every item was a high stakes crapshoot. You’d watch and wonder, “Is that guy’s supposed set of George Washington’s teeth real (gasp!), or just a hoax his playful dead grandpa played on the family???”
But now it seems like everything they show is a lost treasure worth thousands, and the only duds get shown comically at the end during the credits.
Am I right? Has there been a noticable emphasis shift since the show first aired? If so, do you agree it’s a change for the worse?
Now that you mention it, it does seem like the worthless crap has been relegated to the closing credits. And yeah, it’s a shame. The occasional pointers on how to spot fakes, or why certain items weren’t valuable because there are still zillions of them knocking around, and stuff like that were cool.
Plus, you could fantasize about being the guy with the priceless masterpiece picture, while knowing in your heart that you’d be the guy who spent all day lugging around a cheap reproduction from the Sears Roebuck catalog.
heh - I miss those too! My favorite was the guy that planned to send his daughter to college by selling his “antique Chinese” porcelain statue… that was actually mass-produced in Italy in the early 1970s.
I’m glad not to see the klunkers anymore, because of the subtle bias involved whenever the show highlighted them. Every single time, the person who had the klunker was someone who had done research and tried to identify the piece, and gotten his/her facts horribly wrong. The message of the show seemed to be “If you’re not one of our appraisers, you can’t possibly know anything about antiques.” Sorry, but I’ve been making a living (at least in part) off of buying and selling antiques for far too long to accept that logic. Appraisers misidentify stuff, and rank beginners can and do locate and correctly identify overlooked treasures. Especially in the early days of the show, it seemed like your only chance of owning something valuable was to have performed no research.
It’s a shame, because oftentimes the fakes and copies teach more than the real thing and they should have had a more valuable place in the show than putting upstart newbies in their places.