That’s the gimmick of “Chubb’s Antiques Roadshow,” a 13-episode series set to debut in January on PBS. The idea is simple: people in a selected city are invited to lug their bric-a-brac–anything from comic books to Chippendale furniture–to a central location where expert appraisers and camera crews lie in wait. When an appraiser comes across a noteworthy item, a garage-sale vase worth thousands or maybe just something with a good story behind it, owner and appraiser go on camera. It’s a bit like a game show, but you supply your own prize. During a taping in Philadelphia, one woman showed up with an old helmet she’d found in her parents’ attic and cleaned up with a can of Pledge. Turns out it was a 16th-century Milanese piece worth $250,000. Top that, Pat Sajak.
The BBC’s version of the show has been a hit for nearly 20 years in England. Appraisers get stopped in the street, and antique-clutching hopefuls have been known to start queuing up at 4:30 a.m. Of course, sheep herding and darts also pass for programming over there. Still, it’s not hard to imagine the sort of prosperous baby boomers who’ve made “This Old House” a hit tuning in for tips. (These are the folks who regularly use “antique” as a verb, as in “Let’s hop in the Cherokee and go antiquing.”) “I think it’s something that will grab people,” says Chris Jussel, an amiable antiques dealer who’s been hired to host the series. “It’s definitively educational, it’s got a bit of game show, it’s got drama and it has a changing cast.”
That cast–almost 1,000 strong–trooped into the civic center in Greenwich, Conn., for a taping one September weekend, lugging shopping bags, backpacks and U-Haul boxes. One of the day’s biggest winners was a man named Brendan, who showed up with a sword he’d been given by his father. The weapon, which he knew little about and thought might bring “three, four, five hundred dollars,” was a rare Civil War relic, an appraiser explained–worth perhaps $25,000. Brendan was pleased, but with newfound wealth come newfound worries. Brendan asked that his last name and hometown not be printed: “I don’t want people out there snooping around.”
Plenty of other treasures came to light. Ed, a 74-year-old Greenwich retiree, showed up with a home-run ball hit by Yankee right fielder George Selkirk in 1936. “The ball hit a girder and bounced into the grandstand,” Ed recalled. “My uncle grabbed it and gave it to me and said, “Eddie, get the signatures on this ball’.” Over the course of his youth he did: Selkirk, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and countless others. The ball, gashed by the girder and therefore pedigreed as a genuine game ball, might fetch $15,000 today.
Not everyone walks away wealthy, however. Tapings have turned up spectacular flops: an inherited Gauguin that wasn’t, enough inauthentic Stradivarius violins to fill an orchestra. At the Greenwich show, Ruth Rizzo from New York’s Long Island brought in a large, elaborately inlaid wooden music box for which her family had high hopes. “We’d never seen one like it,” she said. The appraiser had–in fact, at an earlier taping he’d seen five. Heading back to her car, Rizzo was philosophical. “Well, we like it,” she said–and, in the end, that’s all that really matters. Right?
