Nearly at the last half-dozen!

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7: Bargain Hunt

(Shown 5843 times, 2000-2021)

Some game shows try everything they can to ramp up the excitement. ITV seemed to go big on this concept in the 1980s, the network clearly at the zenith of the Licence To Print Money Years. This saw shows such as Ultra Quiz, which would see a group of contestants around the world for a series of themed trivia questions, Run The Gauntlet, which saw teams from each of the home nations battle for supremacy in races using jet skis, quad bikes and the like, or Interceptor, a thrilling concept from the team behind Treasure Hunt that was basically a county-wide game of laser tag. All programmes I loved as a kid, and yet they each had very short shelf lives. After a few years, the Ultra Quiz budget was dropped to the extent David Frost was swapped for Stu Francis and New York swapped for Bournemouth. Interceptor lasted for a single series and despite being deemed popular enough for a spin-off videogame in 1989, Run the Gauntlet nowadays doesn’t even warrant an entry on Wikipedia.

If you want longevity for your game show format, dampen down the excitement quotient a bit. So much so, it’s arguable whether it even warrants a place in the game show genre. Such as the next programme on our list. Recently clocking up its 66th series (vidiprinter: sixty-six) Bargain Hunt tasks a pair of teams (“Red” and “Blue”) with spending a set sum of money on trinkets at an antiques fair, with each having an expert on hand to offer advice. Once the trinkets have been bought, they’re put up for auction, and the team who make the most profit on their original outlay (or the smallest loss) are declared the winners. And… that’s it. No lasers, no helicopters, and any explosions can purely be considered coincidental.

Originally, each team budget was set at £200, and teams could buy as many or as few items as they desired. This was subsequently limited to just three items, presumably to avoid instances of participants buying dozens of items and boring everyone solid at the auction stage. Later on, the budget was upped to £300, and an option of swapping one of their items for an alternative trinket was introduced. This was tweaked further in series 14, allowing for a ‘bonus buy’ to take place with any surplus budget. And that’s pretty much it.

The series came about in 1999, with David Dickinson at the helm. By this point, Dickinson’s TV career had only been a few years old, but his new career trajectory had been much steeper than most. It was something the antiques expert had fallen into following a barbecue at his daughter’s house, where he got chatting to her next door neighbour. That neighbour happened to be Alistair Much, co-owner of a TV production company, who was taken by Dickinson’s resemblance to Ian McShane’s fictional antique roustabout Lovejoy. By happy coincidence, Much was working on pitching a new series on antiques to broadcasters, and thought his brand new pal might just be a perfect participant for it.

In the end, the networks failed to express any interest in that particular series, but Dickinson would go on to feature in an episode of BBC2 documentary strand Modern Times, produced by Much, and looking at – of course – some of the characters within the world of antiques. Dickinson would be the standout figure of the episode – his Lovejoyesque appearance also remarked upon by The Independent’s TV listings – and his personality certainly seemed to resonate with those in the TV industry. Dickinson was plucked to present a Buyer’s Guide segment in BBC Two series The Antiques Show (1997-98), which swiftly led to a pilot of his first solo vehicle (Under Your Nose: a show looking at items “worth a bob or two” lurking in the homes of unsuspecting members of the public, which Dickinson’s autobiog says was broadcast, but which Genome says wasn’t).

[EDIT: Thanks to Daniel Webb for letting me know The Duke did in fact record a different pilot around this time. Swap Until You Drop saw Dickinson team up with A Certain Disgraced Former It’s A Knockout Host and John Fashanu for a competitive swapping roadshow, refereed by Mary Nightingale. This aired once, on Friday 2 April 1999. On top of that, it seems the pilot he was talking about was chopped into bits and used in consumer show pilot Money For Old Rope (BBC One, 7pm 6 Jan 1999), which included a segment where “antiques expert David Dickinson uncovers a few treasures in the homes of three neighbours“.]

His next gig was a little more glamorous, becoming a regular reporter for Holiday in 1998, whisking him off to destinations from Milan to Devon on early evening BBC One. Dickinson’s star was certainly in the ascendancy at that point, with a starring primetime role in C5’s The Antique Hunter. While it made for some memorable segments in early episodes of TV Burp (“I am the Hunter!”), Five honcho Dawn Airey decided a second series wouldn’t be forthcoming. However, a call from the BBC’s Mark Hill soon saw a return to the screen for Dickinson: a new daytime show called Bargain Hunt, airing from March 2000. And it was probably the personality of a man Terry Wogan once introduced as “Peter Stringfellow crossed with a mahogany hatstand” that did more than anything to attract an audience to the programme, with his chipper attitude and occasional asides to camera proving popular.

Before long, that growing attention saw Bargain Hunt moving on up to the big time, and a peak 8pm slot on BBC One in August 2002. While it’s tempting to suggest this was down to a lack of inspiration on the part of the BBC, the ratings don’t lie. The first peaktime episode of Bargain Hunt drew an audience of 6.89m, and the end of that initial primetime run was followed by four episodes of spin-off Celebrity Bargain Hunt Live for that November’s Children in Need week. Stars such as Tony Blackburn, Dermot Murnaghan and Sarah Cawood took part, with any profits going to the charity, and viewing figures rose even further, peaking at 7.88m. That’s two million viewers more than watched Liverpool’s Champions League exit at the hands of FC Basel over on ITV. Take that, UEFA.

However, a daytime show thrust into the big leagues doesn’t often have the stamina to stick to the national consciousness for long, and that was the case for imperial phase Bargain Hunt. The programme slipped out of the BARB Top 30s for BBC One in late 2003, following a move to an Emmerdale-adjacent 7pm slot. A year later, the programme left the primetime schedules, with Dickinson duly leaving for pastures new (mainly reality series Dealing With Dickinson, which lasted for a single series before Dickinson decamped to ITV and his Real Deal). Luckily for Bargain Hunt ultras, the daytime version had remained a going concern throughout the show’s spell in the peak-hour spotlight, with presenter Tim Wonnacott at the controls, and that’s where he would continue.

Himself no slouch when it comes to antiques – before picking up the Bargain Hunt baton, his CV boasted a spell as director of Sotherby’s – the bowtied buff kept the programme on a steady tiller. Well, apart from one episode in 2010 where a musical bed of Mylo’s Drop the Pressure was used, with nobody on the production team noticing the lyric “Motherfuckers gonna drop the pressure” surviving the edit. Whoops. And that coming just a year after a track called “Horny Baby” by Dust Devil stopped being used as the programme’s theme music, too. Pure. Audio. Filth. (Okay, the latter was a light pop-jazz number. But still.)

That mishap aside, little of interest happened in the programme (as far as I’m quite selfishly concerned) until 2015, when an alleged altercation with producers saw Wonnacott initially suspended from the series, and subsequently stepping down. He would continue to serve as narrator for Antiques Road Trip and Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, so it wasn’t the end of the world for him.

From 2016 onwards, the programme would go on to be hosted by a rotating cast of antique experts, including Danny Sebastian from CBeebies’ Junk Rescue, Antiques Roadshow ceramics guru Eric Knowles and Flog It! alumni Caroline Hawley. Despite the addition of new faces front and centre of the programme, Bargain Hunt remained largely affixed to the formula that had served it so well since the dawn of the third millennium, with innovations like a ‘Big Spend Challenge’ and the ‘Presenter’s Challenge’ adding a mere sprinkle of change to the format.

2016 also saw the programme singled out by the press as an example to underline part of Culture Secretary John Whittingdale’s white paper on the future of the BBC, but it’s unlikely many members of the production team were high-fiving each other with excitement. The programme was being dragged out as an example of the BBC sorely lacking “greater levels of creative ambition”.

Of course, it wasn’t remotely cancelled. In fact, Bargain Hunt will probably outlive us all. Hey, each passing year means another year’s worth of stuff becomes antique.

And occasionally, it still has the power to surprise us. Such as an episode in 2018 recruiting hip young indie gunslingers Jarvis Cocker (aged 54 at the time) and Bez (also aged 54), along with respective bandmates Rowetta Idah and Candida Doyle to take part in a pop-themed celebrity episode. What excitement could a quartet of fiftysomething NME darlings really bring to the programme, though?

There’s life in the old dog yet, eh?

BONUS FACT! Bargain Hunt has been mentioned three times in the House of Commons, according to Hansard. And yet none of them was worth mentioning in detail here. How’s that for failing to clear a low bar?

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There we go. That’s the final daytime property or antiques show on the list ticked off. All gold from hereon in. Or your money back.