An Antiques Roadshow guest who hid an ‘ugly’ clock for years was stunned to find out how much it was worth – with his wife equally delighted when he went to tell her what they'd been sitting on.
The bloke, who was called Keith, appeared on the UK version of the show back in 2005, armed with a clock that had been stuffed in a box at home.
When expert Richard Price asked if he'd looked after it, he replied: “No, it lives in a box in the attic – because it’s so ugly.”
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Keith said his wife Audrey was the one who had banished it to the attic after he was given the piece five years beforehand.
Speaking to the camera in a separate interview, Audrey then piped up: “My husband inherited the clock from his uncle, and when he brought it home, I wasn’t impressed at all.
“It was very ugly, very dirty – we didn’t realise how dirty until we were told how dirty it was on the Roadshow.
"I thought that’s the colour it was supposed to be!”
Keith admitted he had a feeling that the clock would be worth ‘a couple of thousand pounds’ as it was ‘pretty old’, but was not prepared for just how much it could fetch.
Talking us through the brass bull figurine under the clock face and the ‘original pendulum’, Price then said: “Even in this state, your initial offer would be in the region of £20,000 – in the rough, like this.”
But it gets better.
He went on: “By the time it’s been lovingly cleaned, restored, everything done beautifully, you’re not going to replace this retail for anything under £30,000 to £35,000.”
Keith said he started getting ‘a bit too excited and a bit emotional’ when he went to tell his wife about the clock’s value – and it seemed she had a similar reaction.
“It just didn’t enter my head, or Keith’s, that it could be that valuable,” Audrey said.
Keith went on to say that they planned to restore the clock before selling it so that they could cash in on those big bucks.
Clock restorer John Jillings said the condition of the piece was ‘rather worrying’ after being sat in an attic – possibly where there was damp – but that it had actually ‘survived very, very well’.
He explained how, when they removed the springs from the barrels, they were actually signed and dated by the manufacturer for February 1754.
And Keith and Audrey were pretty impressed with the restoration, calling it 'fantastic'.
Topics: TV and Film, Antiques Roadshow
Jess Hardiman