Why Antiques Roadshow is still priceless

I tried cocaine but am totally addicted to this. At the end of every episode I am older and wiser.

Tim Wonnacott from the television show Antiques Roadshow.

You will not find drugs among my lifelong addictions. I once tried cocaine at a Hollywood party and found it numbed my teeth. It felt like a trip to the dentist so I couldn’t see the point. And an early experiment with Mary Jane (at another Hollywood event) only made me giggly. I may return to this fine plant for medical reasons, but only on doctor’s advice.

Nor have I needed to join AA for its 12-Step Program. There’s no possibility of an addiction to alcohol when whisky and other spirits taste like petrol to me. And I’m not attracted by the pretensions within the world of wine. Except for a glass of champers on special occasions.

I recently confessed in this column to being an autoholic – someone addicted to fast or posh cars – but at 85 and with dimming faculties, such foolishness is behind me.

Only two addictions remain. Sugar (despite type-2 diabetes) and the BBC’s long-running Antiques Roadshow. Fortunately the latter seems relatively harmless and is available without prescription via ABC iview.

Despite its enormous running costs, this show must be a major money-spinner for the Beeb. It carts us around the stately homes of England (occasionally visiting Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, too) where queues of hopefuls present goodies for inspection by the program’s eccentric experts. From Rolex watches (a perennial AR favourite) to huge lumps of ugly furniture requiring removal vans and forklifts. Every week something bought at the pommy counterpart to our Vinnie’s turns out to be worth a king’s ransom.

Talking of kings reminds me that I’ve often confused the doings of our Royals, God save ’em, with episodes of Antiques Roadshow. The passing of QEII and the coronation of KC3 seemed indistinguishable from my favourite show. “Where did you get this old crown?” “I found it in the attic.” “Well, I’m here to tell you if this bejewelled crash helmet came up for sale at auction it could fetch a zillion quid...”

And talking of queens, here’s a fun fact. A recent episode was filmed near Edinburgh at the world’s most famous golf course, St Andrews. It revealed that the game was introduced to Scotland by (drum roll) Mary Queen of Scots. She’d loved playing golf in France where her heavy clubs were, we were told, “carried by cadets”. Hence the English expression “caddies”. This revelation on the fairway is the sort of thing you expect on the Roadshow. At the end of every episode I am older and wiser.

While regularly amazed at the value of what you can buy in a charity shop or from a boot sale – turning two shillings into 20,000 quid –I’m just as gobsmacked by how cheap many things are. Amazing paintings, objets d’art or anthropological curiosities you’d think would fetch a fortune? “Two hundred pounds, three on a good day.” All very unpredictable.

Some of the Roadshow’s regulars – experts on this and that – are entertaining or loveable ratbags; others are crashing bores. My least favourite? Philip Mould, the upmarket painting expert who co-stars in the AR spin-off Fake or Fortune? with the Roadshow’s current host, Fiona Bruce. If Mould told me the canvas I’d bought from a car boot sale for a tenner was a Turner worth a trillion, I’d tell him to eff off.