Daily Mail

Axe FLOG IT? What a hammer BLOW!

After 1,000 episodes — with countless dreams made and dashed — the Beeb is killing off the auction show Middle England loves. And JAN MOIR is distraught ...

- By Jan Moir

After turning Doctor Who into a lady person, unleashing hideous kiddy show Don’t Scare the Hare on an appalled public and giving James Corden a sketch show instead of a tranquilli­sing dart, the BBC has gone too far this time. far too far!

Pass me the smelling salts, along with a Victorian lace handkerchi­ef in mint condition — and prepare for the worst. the rotters are going to axe flog It!

Yes, flog It! the popular afternoon auction show has been blamelessl­y entertaini­ng its 1.5 million-plus audience for nearly 17 years, but now it is to be pushed off a telly cliff and replaced with an antiques-based quiz.

A quiz! How pathetic. that’s like replacing a grandfathe­r clock with a Mickey Mouse watch and saying, well, you can still tell the time so stop complainin­g.

A quiz, you say? Well, here is my starter for ten. What is it about flog It!, with its mainly white, mainly 60-plus, mainly retired, mainly mild-mannered, mainly unfashiona­ble audience that has encouraged the BBC to pull the plug?

flog It! may have its faults — and that exclamatio­n mark is one of them, I am excising it for the rest of this article. However, it has double the audience of the BBC’s flagship news programme, Newsnight (775,000) — no sign of that being put out of its misery any time soon — and is regularly one of the Beeb’s strongest-performing daytime shows.

Yet it is to be dumped as part of a shake- up to ‘ modernise’ the BBC’s daytime schedule.

flog It will be replaced with not one but six new trendy-tastic shows, and one can only imagine the horror in store. Which will probably involve Sue Perkins and Stormzy, in one way or another.

Look.I can see that swells and trendies might be bored with flog It. Last year it broadcast its 1,000th edition and the format has barely changed since day one.

the premise is simple. Hosted by Paul Martin and a team of antiques ‘experts’, flog It travels around the Uk inviting members of the public to bring their antiques and collectabl­es for inspection and evaluation.

Unlike Antiques roadshow — which is a much posher show — the modest items on flog It are then sold at auction, where they might soar above their reserve price or not sell at all.

If you don’t think that sounds exciting, then you have never seen the face of a woman in a bobbled cardi whose cracked Italian majolica vase was estimated at £40 but eventually sold for £1,200.

I recently spent a week with my parents, who fit the flog It profile right down to their tartan slippers and keen belief that somewhere in our own attic lurks a priceless antique, just waiting to be uncovered and sold for a thrilling sum.

they are huge fans. At 5.15pm every weekday without fail, tea is brewed, feet are up and flog It is on, marking a deceptivel­y gentle transition from day into evening.

for behind the veneration of tribal artefacts, dull diamonds, Clarice Cliff crockery and crystal perfume bottles that Auntie Susan had stashed away for years, all human life and emotion is here.

As the hammer comes down on heirlooms and boot sale finds alike, a torrent of unanswered questions rises to the flog It surface. Does his sister even know he’s selling that? How did they get their mitts on such a gem?

Alongside the curious and the curios lurk greed, venality, jealousy and sometimes even tears. Usually mine. I just can’t cope when sweet elderly couples come on, with the terrible light of hope in their eyes, to try to sell something dear to them so they can give the money to their grandchild­ren. Spend it on yourselves, I want to shriek.

Look a little closer each week and you can see the hardscrabb­le times along with the wishful thinking, the dashed hopes alongside the good fortune, the electropla­te instead of the solid silver. or even the spark of joy when the realisatio­n dawns that Auntie Susan’s knick-knacks are worth a small fortune after all.

‘She obviously mixed in fairly wealthy circles,’ is host Paul Martin’s way of putting us all in our places.

Martin is a bit of a dandy, with a fancy for brightly coloured corduroy suits. He is also demiposh, with the kind of crafty charm that goes down well with the old ladies who bring along their silver teapots and teak barometers.

He was once an antiques dealer himself — no surprise there — and will go on flogging it to death, with a new studio- based antiques entertainm­ent show next year. But it just won’t be the same.

for broadcaste­rs mess with our deep and abiding love of antiques shows at their peril. the pull of nostalgia livened by a spear of greed is irresistib­le for millions of viewers. there is a reason why flog It, along with programmes such as the Antiques roadshow, Dickinson’s real Deal, Secret Dealers, Antiques road trip and Bargain Hunt are so popular.

It is not just that we like watching people like ourselves. It is more that millions take great comfort in the crammed landscape of Britain’s collectabl­es and antiquitie­s market; in the jumble and treasure that move from car boot sale to junk shop to charity outlet to auction house to Tv show and back again. And that is because so many of these items are relatable to our own lives.

the letters from the trenches, the war medals, the Staffordsh­ire po pottery, the Highland sto stoneware, the sugar tongs, gin ginger jars, butler’s tables, toys toys, paintings and ornaments — the they all tell the story of our nation nation. Great heaps of stuff that were passed p down by relatives or cramm crammed under stairs or left to gather dust on top of wardrobes. It m might not belong to us but it is still sti part of our collective heritage, herit quietly displayed in this most British of teatime pro programmes. In a recent episode of flog It, roger from Sheffield was selling se his boyhood toys — little lif forties metal with lorries wind-up from tipper the trucks that had cost his parents 65 shillings (£3.25). the company had to stop making them during World War II because every last scrap of metal was needed for ammunition. roger loved them so much, he went on to become a toyshop owner himself. All this was so ordinary but extraordin­ary, too. I hate to think that these touching and human stories are going to be replaced with some razzle-dazzle, shrieking info-tainment. ‘Are you going to have one last wind?’ Martin asked roger, before the trucks he had loved for 60 years went under the hammer. So he cranked a handle and gave it a whirl one last time. Which is more than you can say for poor, doomed flog It.

 ??  ?? Genial Gen host: Flog It!’s Paul Pau Martin and friend
Genial Gen host: Flog It!’s Paul Pau Martin and friend
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