I'm impressed with PBS lately, they've got a lot of really good series on it. I'm even watching Rick Steves, which I would not ordinarily do. (I like the bloopers at the end of the episodes.)
He's gotten old, too.
But I really like British programming, some of the frivolous stuff that makes people roll their eyes. I noticed last March (2019, not this year, obviously) to my shock that James Braxton of Antiques Road Trip was actually being shown in prime time while I was there, and on BBC1 no less. That show and he have been on a
long time.
In Edit: Also on Youtube there are tons of shows called Antiques Road SHOW starring James Braxton AND Charles Hanson, whom I really enjoy seeing.
It's not like our Antiques Road
Show here? It's not people with items from home which have been in the family for millennia (some of which turn out to be only 20 years old or something) which they bring in hopes of finding out how much it is worth.
It's two antique experts given a small budget for a week who compete with each other for having made the most astute purchases. They go out daily for a week, to what appears to be the billion antique stores in the UK, driving vintage cars and then they spend their money and take the objects to an auction daily and see who has the most profit for the day...this continues all week when a winner is crowned. It's so much fun. Obviously this would not work if they were not charming and intelligent and knowledgeable, which they are. So it's fun and you learn something about antiques on the way, of which I know nothing. But they do.
There were tons of variations of these shows on in March, too, and there was some complaint about the many variations of it on the BBC. I like James Braxton, one of the hosts of the thing. I am surprised to see him still there, but it was so much fun, he's gotten older like the rest of us and wider, using suspenders, but he's still fun to watch. The biggest shock was seeing another of the experts who was the young man on the block at one time, now with gray hair, but still the same personality.
Sometimes they're paired with novices so we learn a lot but you always learn something from their shows. Just yesterday I learned about the Ashington miners, the Pitmen Painters of Northumberland, who took up expressing what they saw in the mines in art, and there was also a special kind of dancing in the area, which was quite interesting. There was a bit on Powis Castle, but the most startling thing was a bit on the stone walls of England. It seems that in the 18th century's Property Law, 6.8 million acres of land formerly held as common land was distributed to individuals if I understood that correctly and they then marked the borders with their famous stone walls with no mortar. 180,000 miles of dry stone walls. That is the very thing for which the Gracchi in Roman history were killed, so that really stood out to me.
The only down thing about the series is that apparently they lately are offering Celebrity Antique Road Trip with the more famous hosts, and the issue is the "Celebrities." The ego is really a challenge for the affable experts, who glide over it and laugh it off, winning over the egotistical STARS, as if it were not there. Of course we don't KNOW any of these "celebrities," like the two women who played for years as police detectives. The one was charming, the other was a pill, but at the end she declared, with a face indicating she was being tortured by nails, that she was really enjoying herself. Faugh. I couldn't even watch the Brian Blessed one where he talked about himself incessantly.
Other than that, however, if you will type in the name of a British series you enjoy on the end of this:
watchbbcseries.com something like watchbbcseries.com Antique Road Trip James Braxton
or watchbbsecries.com come dine with me
Or whatever show you want to see, you may be surprised to see them playing on facebook and youtube channel free and I think there are about 200 of the Antique Road Trip ones (not all with James Braxton)...
So to me, who is missing these types of harmless fun shows, which fill up entire channels on British TV including Four in a Bed, it's such fun to be able to even see them again, and the Come Dine With Me ones are recent as well; they are, in fact, the same ones playing last March. It does NOT seem to cover their movies such as Shakespeare and Hathaway, or Father Brown, however, but it's what you would see if there, right along with such trashy American fare as Storage Wars (which you can see in Italy dubbed into Italian), and Pawn Stars. I like to think that the Road Trip is on a higher plane .
