Burton Bradstock Village Society
There must have been a near record crowd at the village hall on 8th Feb to hear Paul Atterbury give a talk entitled ‘ Behind the Scenes on the Antique Road Show’.
The show was started in 1977 and the BBC thought it would be a short lived affair! It could be described as a very private conversation between two people, overheard by up to ten million people, recorded in one take with no script and hardly any preparation. An average show can see up to 2000 people in one day, on spec, bringing along up to 10,000 objects where a maximum of 50 will be filmed with about 15 objects making it onto the programme. The average queuing time is 3 hours. Many objects are unfilmable or worthless and the experts have to be good at giving bad news to owners all day with loads of tears or dealing with uncontrolled jumping for joy.
Despite all of this, the programme is very successful and has become an early Sunday evening TV institution for us all. Very often, it is the stories behind the objects that are more interesting than the objects themselves and our excellent speaker gave us some both moving and outrageously funny episodes from his time with the show . It was very important to have clean finger nails and be dressed appropriately. Some visitors had been known to rush off to change clothes and have a hair makeover before filming.
Altogether a thoroughly entertaining evening- we did not want him to stop!
The next meeting is on Friday 7th March in which Bob Mizon will talk about the Vital Role of the Sun re-visited and Astronomical developments to look out for in the next 2 years.
for more information about this and other talks go to the Village Society's programme