Martians have landed!... (Bargain Hunt)

Member Name: angry chris

Product:	Bargain Hunt
Date:	17/11/02 (254 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dickinson is a right laugh., The auction is entertaining., The idiots generally lose.

Disadvantages: Contestants are muppets., Experts are muppets., It is "cheap as chips"...

Hands up all of those who liked "The Antiques Roadshow"? Thought so. Like most people, I thought it was full of old, far-too-wealthy stiffs showing off the family airloom passed down by the eighth earl of cumberland or some other 15th century landowner, knowing fine well that it was worth an utter stack of cash, and yet they still felt the need to show the nation just how lucky they really were. Antiques programmes, in my house, were an aviodable evil.
So I went at Bargain Hunt with a great deal of trepidation. For those of you who don't know, Bargain Hunt is a daytime show on BBC1, normally half hour long, and it shown between 11am and 1pm. It is typical, cheap daytime TV fodder. The premise is simple. Give two pairs of lonely people with far too much spare time a couple of hundred quid, send them off to an antiques fair with the daily antiques "expert", and tell them to buy as much tat as they can in an hour, in order to take it home and give it the Brasso treatment so it can be sold a week later at auction. Whatever profit they make at auction-they keep.
The idea is at least appealing in it's originality. And the show is all the more entertaining for it. In truth, the show can be dissected into many parts, as it seems to combine tons of different ideas and enimgas to create one "glorious whole".
Top of this particular list is the host, the genial Mr David Dickinson. An antiques dealer in a former life, he is "Lovejoy" incarnate. He is also the most odd looking person ever to appear on a television screen, and thus possibly the most hilarious. He has, I kid you not, the most flurescent orange skin imaginable, a mullet most German porn stars would be proud of, rainbow coloured glasses straight from the Dennis Taylor school of fashion and a hatful of cheesy catchphrases to brighten up the day-"Cheap as Chips!" being my particular favourite. He could talk the arse of a donkey
, constantly wittering on about a variety of unrelated jibberish, constantly talking into the camera refering the the audience as "bargain hunters..." as if he genuinely believes that someone will respond in kind. When at auction, he seems in a world of his own, often bidding for items himself, getting his valuations wrong more often than not and his basic grasp of human mathematics is appaling- he really struggles to add and subtract the contestants totals.
Thus, my definative conclusion which cannot be reputed is that Mr Dickinson is, in fact, a martian. All the radiation from the sun on this strange planet he has visited has caused the skin discolouration-the rest comes straight from the Lovejoy tapes he has seen on his own planet, presuming that this is the normal appearance of an earthling...
Or perhaps not.
Joining Dickenson usually are a foursome of really sad, trailer park trash human beings straight from the Jerry Springer school of Intelligent Homo-sapiens. These dullards, who really should be AT WORK in the middle of the morning, truly make me want to leap out of my seat, stick a very large bayonet through the screen and proceed to gouge out the glazed-over eyes I see before me. These people seem intent of buying whatever pieces of tat they clap their googly eyes on-usually at a ridiculously high price. Deserving of particular contempt are a straw stuffed fluffy cat(£90 quid, anyone), and pottery with cracks or chips in. Now, I know nothing about antiques, but I do know that damage lowers value. Dickinson always TELLS them that it devalues the piece. And yet the STILL buy it!!!
Accompanying these blind mice are the resident experts: auctioneers and antiques dealers who, judging by their dress, really need the appearance money from this show. Particuarly idiotic is one Phillip Serrill, who dresses in the same flashers mac and tartan scarf each time his smug, imbecilic mug appears on the show. He looks like a rathe
r demonic verson of Rupert the Bear, and he constantly encourages the contestants to buy items of such poor standard, that Dickinson always knows precisely who is responsible for it. A piece of wood with axe marks in it? Believe me, this guy put it into the auction, and worryingly expected it to make money...
So far, so very odd. Yet, once the actual auction comes round, the show begins to become strangely appealing. The alien and the resident auctioneer evaluate the pieces with an equal measure of general distain and contempt, and them move on to a piece which Mr Illumation particularly likes. You can tell he really enjoys this part, distancing himself from the rubbish he's had to deal with so far, and moving to the REAL antiques. He spouts on his usual nonsense, purrs enthusiastically, rounds off with another cheesy line and moves on to the actual auction, where usually the enevitable happens, and the cheap rubbish is sold to some unfortunate who is willing to pay about half the price paid by the contestants, interspersed with the auction for the piece Dickinson liked, often culminating in Dickinson himself having a bid, until the REAL antiques dealers come in and price him out of the auction entirely. Still, worth a try...
And there you have it. The show that has made the man with the nuclear face a household name. And despite what I have said, I really do like it. Divide the show in two, and you have a really annoying first fifteen minutes where you want to go on a homicidal rampage through sheer exasparation, and a final 15 minutes where you will find that you really, really hope the pieces sell for precisely nought to teach the idiots a lesson, and in a most satisfactory way, they usually do. It is quite rare for a team to make a profit, and you can count on one hand the amount of times contestants have made enough money to make the whole thing worthwhile. But that isn't the point. This show is just designed as a cheap and
cheerful listings filler, fronted by a cheap and cheerful host. To everyones surprise, it has become a real hit, and has occasionally moved itself to prime time BBC1. It has become imitated by a seemingly never-ending host of rip-offs, including "Cash in the Attic" and "Flog-it!", both on BBC. Yet is yet to be beaten. The cheap and cheerful host has become a household name, and apparently is leaving soon for better things.
Spaceship must be on its way to take him home...

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