HAPPY 45th
It’s a track record of prime-time television: reading the news, hosting Come Dancing and Eurovision, and guest-starring on Morecambe and Wise. For Michael Aspel and Angela Rippon, who both have all these on their televisual CVs, the cherry on the top of the BBC cake was hosting Antiques Roadshow.
This Sunday viewers will be able to dip into Roadshows from the past when BBC4 broadcasts a series of archive editions — including the very first from 1979 (presented by Bruce Parker), as well as one each with Rippon, Aspel, the late Arthur Negus and Hugh Scully, and the current presenter, Fiona Bruce.
Viewers — and the antique experts on the show — would become attached to each presenter, and when Aspel joined in 2000, some of the specialists were put out that not only had Scully been ejected, but a man who’d hosted Miss World 14 times was brought in. “As far as they were concerned, I was a vulgar interloper,” says Aspel. They also complained that he knew nothing about antiques. “But I didn’t have to. They were the ones with the knowledge.”
Although the format has stood the test of time, as the repeats highlight, other aspects of the programme have changed, as Aspel, now 91 and still a keen viewer, notices.
“Since I left, people bring along items from the 1970s, which for me seems like only a few days ago.
Sometimes they have autographs of people I met during my career — the Beatles, film stars like Elizabeth Taylor and David Niven.”
Angela Rippon, 79, who joined in 1979 and left in 1983 for TV-am, has also noticed how today’s Roadshows reflect changing taste. “People would bring huge pieces of furniture in great lorries, but now you just can’t shift brown furniture, it’s just not valuable. The toys have changed too. Back then it was Steiff teddy bears, now it’s Barbie dolls and even technology.”
“I just loved Antiques Roadshow,” she says. “It was like reaching back into the past, through people’s stories and the objects.”
Aspel retained a connection with the programme through get-togethers, including Christmas lunches with as many as 40 former experts and others involved in the programme. “I miss the travel, though,” he says. “I’d arrive at a venue and think, ‘I’d like to live here’ and then think exactly the same at the next
