Four Rooms, Channel 4, review

Michael Deacon reviews Four Rooms, a new Channel 4 series in which members of the public try to sell artefacts to ruthless dealers.

Four Rooms (Channel 4) is curious. It’s an alloy of Antiques Roadshow and Dragons’ Den: members of the public try to flog artefacts to the show’s four dealers. Enjoyment is probably meant to come from schadenfreude when the sellers get less money than they expected, but I was more intrigued by the dealers.

The sole female, Emma Hawkins, wears tight leather trousers, high heels and a suggestive pout, and speaks in the sort of breathy whisper Marilyn Monroe employed to sing Happy Birthday to JFK.

The sellers, all of them men, were each asked to choose the dealer they wished to talk to first; oddly enough, they all chose her, except for an elegant, softly spoken gentleman with dyed pink hair.

The dealers set themselves up as hard-nosed and ruthless, except when an elderly man tried to sell them a bust of Hitler brought back after the War from a concentration camp. Suddenly, the dealers were all models of propriety who would never dream of making money from such a “heinous and abhorrent” item.

Finally one of them gave the seller a pound and told him the bust would be donated to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. I suppose the dealers’ idea was to impress us with their decency, although humiliating an elderly man was an unusual way to go about it.