You'd have to be living in a tree not to know that the BBC's wildly popular Antiques Roadshow visited Canada last autumn, filming shows in both Ottawa and Toronto. Along with the rest of the world, we had a chance to see these two one-hour programs on CBC's Newsworld in January.
To my great surprise, the British experts, who brought in for the occasion a team of five Canadian specialists, such as Erik Peters of Joyner Fine Art in Toronto, found some superb pieces: porcelain, furniture (including an armchair worth between $30,000 and $35,000), pictures, silver, jewellery (like a spectacular gold and emerald cross worth $50,000) and several extraordinary artefacts (such as a leather and quillwork fringed jacket). And yes, I was surprised. It was hot and sunny in Toronto for the shoot at Casa Loma and almost each of the 2,400 people who lined up to get in brought several items to be evaluated. They brought stuff in children's wagons, old shopping carts, walkers, wheelchairs and wheeled suitcases; they carried it in backpacks, purses and plastic grocery bags. Some brought furniture in trucks and used dollies to bring the pieces into the Casa Loma gardens; some simply arrived with photographs. The show's producers finally had to announce they couldn't allow more than five items for each person. I figured that each day the experts sorted through more than 12,000 items, winnowing out 40 possibles and a final 20 to showcase on air.
And the people who came weren't Canada's great collectors, the kind who ship Georgian breakfronts to New York to auction or pick up Impressionist paintings in London; most were everyday collectors like thee and me. What amazed me, as I walked from one table to the next watching people unwrapping their treasures, was the tact and kindness shown by each Roadshow expert, even when the piece was, at best, a collectible.
"That's a photograph of a copy of a watercolour," Erik Peters told one woman gently as he peered at her framed picture.
"It's not an original?" she gasped.
"No – but it's a very nice photograph of a copy of an original."
"What's it worth?"
"Well, nothing in terms of dollar value, but I'm sure it has sentimental value for your family," he said, just as carefully.
Crushed, she turned away.
Now the people lining up for so many hours to get in are keeners, Roadshow groupies who swoon at the sight of porcelain expert Henry Sandon and crowd around furniture expert John Bly for autographs. They stand in line swapping Roadshow trivia. But the painful truth is that many bring dreck. What my mother used to call "late Taft-early Wilson." Dime store china, plated teapots worn down to the EPNS (Electro-Plated Nickel Silver) marks, the stuff you see left over in cartons at yard sales when the pickers have all finished and gone.
"Doesn't it make you angry?" I asked one of the experts.
"No," he said. "This happens in England, too. We see just as much junk there. But people love the show and we would never hurt their feelings."
The show's publicists had invited me to bring something too. I'd drifted around my house, looking at stuff. Nothing looked interesting enough, old enough, rare enough, lovely enough. I was terrified I'd bring something that would elicit a raised eyebrow, a smirk, a little cough of derision. And where I did have valuable things I knew what they were and what they were worth. What I really needed was information on pieces that bewildered me. Finally, I chose a piece of needlepoint given to me by a friend of my late mother-in-law; a watercolour that had belonged to my grandfather; a Japanese kimono, badly damaged after being scratched by my cairn terrier; and a charcoal sketch I bought at London's Portobello Market in 1965 for five pounds. I packed them carefully and hauled them along, but once I saw the crowds – the delighted, laughing, patient people who waited for hours to show their most precious things – I lost my nerve and left everything in the car.
I had another chance a few weeks ago. Here in Toronto, Ritchie's Auctioneers & Appraisers agreed to hold their own road show to raise money for the Out of the Cold charity program at my church, St. Andrew's. We feed homeless men and women all year-long and the money ($10 for each item appraised) went for food. I took the same things I'd wrapped for the BBC.
Well, it was interesting. Stephen Ranger, Ritchie's senior vice-president and auctioneer, has a soft spot for needlework, and melted at the sight of the unframed shepherdess in her plaid skirt and apron, carrying a crook, with sheep at her feet and clouds billowing overhead. It says, in stitchery at the bottom, 'Margaret Gardner's work, 1832.'
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