BBC Antiques Roadshow guest speechless as £1 vase bought at boot sale makes staggering value
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Antiques Roadshow's Eric Knowles was left gobsmacked when a glass vase, purchased for a mere £1 at a car boot sale, was valued at an astonishing amount.
A woman from Ayrshire, who wished to remain anonymous, brought the vase to the BBC show for evaluation, not anticipating the staggering valuation she would receive.
The vase was identified as a 1929 piece by famed French designer René Lalique, after being scrutinised by experts at Dumfries House near Cumnock, and was valued at a minimum of £25,000. The five-inch-tall glass vase was crafted using an ancient technique known as cire perdue.
This complex method involves creating a wax model that is encased in plaster, then melted away and replaced with molten glass, with the plaster mould being broken away once the glass cools to reveal the final creation. The market value for Lalique pieces has seen a significant increase in recent years.
Antiques Roadshow expert Eric Knowles shared his excitement with the Irvine Herald: "It's wonderful to find treasures like this beautiful vase during the programme's filming," reports the Express.
(Image: BBC)
He continued: "It certainly gives us all a buzz and we thoroughly enjoy meeting people everywhere we go. I've been waiting over 25 years for such a piece to come in, and this was the stuff of dreams. They'd dumped it in the attic after the plant in it died and were about to throw it away. We had a lot of clouds in Dumfries, but this was the cloud with a silver lining. It's worth at least £25,000."
The vase ultimately fetched a whopping £32,450 at auction, exceeding its previous valuation by £7,000.
This follows a rerun of the beloved BBC programme, which aired on Sunday, June 8. Viewers were transported to Brodie Castle in Scotland, where a parade of treasures awaited appraisal.
Among them was a man who wowed Richard with a 1960s Rolex GMT-Master, inherited from his uncle.
Richard, peering intently at the watch, informed the owner: "All Rolex collectors refer to these things by their reference number," and "You know as well as I do, because it says so on the dial, that it's a GMT-Master."
(Image: BBC)
Richard explained: "It's the reference 1675, which is the classic GMT-Master. When you said 60s, I think we could fairly safely say 1960 to 1961, so that all fits in."
Upon closer inspection, Richard was thrilled to find the watch unaltered, noting that many watches are often modified during servicing, much to collectors' dismay.
He said: "They would've changed the bezel and they would've changed the dial with an upgrade," before adding:"You would've had it back thinking, 'Oh, it looks like new'. Collectors hate that, it's absolutely original, spot-on."
The expert told the owner: "It's a Rolex product, of course, but it says 'Made in the USA'. So perhaps he specified that he did not want the oyster bracelet; he wanted a jubilee bracelet, and they put this one on for him.
"Which sort of detracts from it a little bit, probably detracts from it by a couple of thousand pounds." However, Richard had some good news as well, revealing that the watch is worth "£12,000 to £15,000."
You can catch Antiques Roadshow every Sunday at 8pm on BBC1.
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It would not be long before Brian staged a successful revolt against the crude attempts of his father to control every aspect of their career through playing the parts of manager, promotion man and – particularly unwelcome – adviser on songwriting and record production. Murry's financial generosity had provided his teenaged sons with their first instruments, as well as cars and surfboards, but he derided the songs about what he saw as silly, ephemeral subjects, and fined them for such offences as hanging out with girls ($50), swearing ($100) and not setting up their equipment fast enough (also $100). He was fired by the group following an argument at the 1964 session at which they recorded I Get Around, their first No 1. But he still retained control of their song publishing company, and five years later, to Brian's fury, he sold their copyrights for $700,000; within a few years they would be worth many millions. 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His intention, he later claimed, was 'to redraw the entire map of pop music'. Hints of the different approach evident in two massive hits, Help Me Rhonda and California Girls, came into full bloom in Pet Sounds, where a cover version of Sloop John B – suggested by Jardine, who had started out as a folk singer – represented the only acknowledgement of the style that had made them famous and provided them with another hit single. But now, rather than zestful and optimistic songs about cars and surfing, it was the yearning ballads with their chromatic melodies, unexpected harmonic shifts and delicate instrumental textures – the heart-melting Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, I Know There's An Answer and Caroline, No – that set the tone. Not all the members of the group were delighted by the new approach, which they rightly suspected to have been rooted in Brian's first experience of LSD: an undiluted dose taken in the spring of 1965 which left him, in the words of his biographer Tim White, both exhilarated and distraught, and never quite the same again. Love, in particular, despised the introspective lyrics supplied by Tony Asher, an advertising copywriter who found precisely the right words to match the swooning poetry of Wilson's melodies. As the group's extrovert front man, Love wanted to stay with the simple formula that had worked so well, and was not reluctant to express his opinion in the most caustic terms. A rift opened, and it would never be fully closed. A mixed reception for Pet Sounds in the US (although it was acclaimed in Britain) indicated to Love that he was in the right, and Brian's next project, a song cycle originally titled Dumb Angel and later known as SMiLE, proved even more divisive. Love provided the hippy-trippy words for Good Vibrations, the epic product of 30 separate studio sessions, but he balked at the new style of free-associative lyrics supplied by Van Dyke Parks, a 23-year-old former child actor and musical prodigy, for the other songs, whose melodies Brian composed at a grand piano placed in a sand-box specially built in the dining room of his Beverly Hills house. Famously, Love found it impossible to get his head around 'Over and over / The crow flies / Uncover the cornfield' (from the song Cabin Essence). The orchestrations for these new multi-sectioned songs were becoming ever more elaborate and eccentric, culminating in Brian's insistence that the session musicians playing on a piece called The Elements: Fire, a strident cacophony intended to evoke the conflagration that devastated Chicago in 1871, should do so wearing plastic firemen's helmets bought by Marilyn at a children's shop. A real fire across the street after the session, followed by an outbreak of blazes in Los Angeles, seemed a bad omen, but the real reason for the abandonment of SMiLE was the internal strife that disheartened first Parks, who walked away from the project, and then Wilson. Brian's increasing dependence on drugs – marijuana, LSD, and eventually and most damagingly cocaine – destroyed what had once been an exemplary work ethic; now he stayed at home in his new Bel Air mansion with his wife and two small daughters, rising late, eating junk food and playing Spector's records over and over again to the occasional visitor. There was concern as the weight of the man who had once owned a Hollywood health-food store called The Radiant Radish ballooned until, still in his early 30s, he weighed more than 109 kg (17st 2lb). Remnants of the aborted SMiLE project were released under the title Smiley Smile, and Good Vibrations became a No 1 hit around the world, but Brian's contributions to the group's subsequent albums diminished along with their mass popularity, even though there were occasional new jewels, veering from the euphoria of This Whole World and to the almost unbearable poignancy of Til I Die. Not even an appearance at Fillmore East in New York alongside the Grateful Dead and the long awaited release of the legendary Surf's Up – based on a solo version performed for Leonard Bernstein on a US TV show – on an album of the same name in 1971 could fully restore the Beach Boys' fortunes. At Wembley Stadium on midsummer's day in 1975 they performed a magical set that briefly reminded 50,000 people who had turned up to hear Elton John of the timeless joy of their music, but of Brian there was no sign. Patchy reunion albums, managerial upheavals, Brian and Marilyn's divorce, artistic and financial disagreements between Love and the Wilsons, peacemaking efforts by Carl, Dennis's death by drowning in 1983 and the departure of Jardine punctuated the years leading up to the appearance, in 1988, of an excellent solo album led off by a fine song, Love and Mercy, in which Brian seemed to have made peace with his demons. For six years he had been in the care of Eugene Landy, a psychotherapist who insisted on 24-hour care and control of his clients. In Brian's case he also assumed the functions of manager, co-songwriter and record producer, earning fees of about $300,000 a year for his work, as well as royalties. Wilson's autobiography Wouldn't It Be Nice was ghostwritten under Landy's supervision and later disowned by its subject. Landy's success in persuading Brian to lose weight and give up recreational drugs helped to avert a possible early death, but many believed that his use of other forms of medication had turned his patient into a muted, zombie-like creature: the inmate of a prison without walls. But in 1986, while browsing in a Cadillac showroom, Brian met a saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter, with whom he struck up a relationship. As depicted in the 2014 feature film Love & Mercy, in which the youthful and older versions of Brian were played by Paul Dano and John Cusack, she helped free him from the clutches of Landy, who was eventually charged with unethical behaviour and improper prescription of drugs, losing his licence to practise. Wilson married Ledbetter in 1995. His new wife became his new manager, supervising a revival that took wing in 1998, when – shortly after his brother Carl's death from lung cancer – he toured the world performing Pet Sounds in its entirety, with the skilled members of a Los Angeles band, the Wondermints, taking the place of the original Beach Boys. (The performances were repeated in 2016, on a tour marking the album's 50th anniversary.) In 2002 he appeared in the garden of Buckingham Palace, performing God Only Knows at Queen Elizabeth II's golden jubilee celebration. Two years later he chose the Royal Festival Hall in London for the world premiere of the painstakingly reconstructed SMiLE, giving a triumphant performance prefaced by a standing ovation for Van Dyke Parks, who was in the audience. A new recording of the piece was released to further acclaim, followed by the appearance of the original version, pieced together from the 1967 recordings. Several solo albums followed, featuring new songs of variable quality and guest appearances from such admirers as Elton John and McCartney. Witnesses to his post-comeback appearances would sometimes be disconcerted by occasional signs of strain and bemusement, and that angelic voice had lost most of its youthful range and flexibility. Nevertheless in every concert there were moments when he came to life and demonstrated that he could share the audience's enjoyment of bathing in the still-sunkissed warmth of a seemingly endless string of great songs, the products of one of the most fertile and innovative musical minds of his time. Melinda died in January 2024. Two weeks later Wilson's management team applied for a conservatorship order, following a diagnosis of dementia. He is survived by the two daughters of his first marriage, Wendy and Carnie, by five adopted children – the daughters Daria, Delanie and Dakota, and the sons Dylan and Dash – and by six grandchildren. Brian Wilson, songwriter and singer, born 20 June 1942; died 11 June 2025
