2024-06-24
Bruce Parker and a team of experts invite people to bring along their antiques to the Corn Exchange in Newbury for examination and information. This is the first transmitted episode of Antiques Roadshow, airing on 18 February 1979. (The first recorded pilot programme was filmed on 17 May 1977 and transmitted on 8 April 1979.).
Hugh Scully and Arthur Negus go back in time to the medieval and Elizabethan period to explore the emergence of a distinctive English style of furniture, in keeping with the bold buccaneering spirit of the age.
Hugh Scully and Arthur Negus take a closer look at furniture made in the Jacobean and Restoration period. Designs of the era were severe until a Continental influence arrived with the Restoration of Charles II, bringing a more luxurious, elaborate look.
Groundbreaking docudrama from 1956 exploring the experiences of the then 75,000 West Indians who had newly settled in Britain, and the disparity they found between the mythical country and the real one.
Documentary that tells the little-known story of sports legend Arthur Ashe off the tennis court. Known to most on account of his stellar sports career – he became the first black man to win Wimbledon in 1975 – the film uncovers Ashe's work as a social activist, a role that embraced the civil rights movement in the US, African Americans and oppressed people throughout the world.
Sam Willis explores how, by the Wars of the Roses, castles were under attack from a new threat – the cannon – but survived into the Tudor era only to find their whole purpose challenged. What had once been strategic seats of power now had to keep up with the fickle fashions of the court and become palaces to impress monarchs such as Elizabeth I. Just as castles seemed to have lost their defensive
Hugh Scully hosts as the roadshow visits Barnstaple, north Devon.
The team investigate an 18th-century landscape: could it be a lost work by the great British master of landscape painting, Thomas Gainsborough? The painting has been in the family of owner Mark Cropper for generations, and until the 1970s it was considered to be a Gainsborough. But then a valuation downgraded it to a Barker of Bath – an attribution Philip calls a 'bin name'. Mark's father tore off
The remains of a Tudor house in Leicestershire were thought to be the childhood home of England's forgotten queen, Lady Jane Grey. But when archaeologists excavate, they find more than they bargained for. In Northern Ireland, the graveyard of a Victorian workhouse sheds new light on one of the most traumatic periods of modern Irish history, the Great Famine of 1845. A team from Sheffield Universit
Archaeologist Richard Miles shows how discoveries in the 18th and 19th centuries overturned ideas of when and where civilisation began as empires competed to literally "own" the past. Moderation: Richard Miles.