What the Roadshow Shows
by Wentworth Sutton, assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto
December 7, 2005
As our media analyst pointed out in an earlier article, the Antiques Roadshow is all over the airwaves these days. It's even more so these days, now that the Canadian edition has debuted.
Natalie's deft dissection of the semiotics of the show inspired me to pay more attention to it, and I found that not only is it a semiotic treasure trove, it's a psychological one as well. In particular, it gives us a look – a long one – into that supposedly elusive entity often referred to as the Canadian national character.
In Canada we get to watch three versions of the Roadshow – the original British one, the American one, and the Canadian one. If you're not familiar with the show, people bring their antiques and collectibles in to get a free valuation from an expert. You learn a lot about antiques and collecting, and you get to see people find out that Greatgrandma's old toothbrush which has been lying around at the back of a drawer for decades is now worth a whole ton of money.
The national differences between the shows are generally what one would expect – the Canadians and Americans are more informal, for example. One of the differences, though, surprised me.
The big payoff on the Antiques Roadshow comes when an item is evaluated for much more than its owner paid for it. The reactions by the owners of the objects are quite different in each country.
In the British version the punters visibly repress any eager anticipation while the valuer is discussing their item. When the big price is announced they start, then quickly regain emotional control, often opining that that's quite a disappointment because now one will have to increase one's insurance. On the American show, the owners repress nothing – they exclaim, they laugh, they cry, they jump up and down, and in general they show a lively appreciation of the degree of good luck which has befallen them.
Those differences are what most of us would expect. The owners on the British show tend to be drawn from the upper classes, and who is better than the British upper classes at repressing emotion? And who is better than Americans, in the English-speaking world at least, at wearing their hearts on their sleeves? The typical Canadian reaction, though, flabbergasted me.
Canadians barely react at all. They usually confine themselves to acknowledging that they've heard the estimate. One fellow, for example, upon being told that an item he had bought for $10 or $20 was worth $1,500, merely nodded his head and said in a flat unemotional tone "Good to know." That is effusive for the Canadian show. One woman, when told that her item, which she had purchased for a few hundred dollars was worth $10,000, said "Hm."
Owner after owner appears profoundly unimpressed by his or her good fortune. About halfway through each show I start to wonder "Why are they there?" Why get your goods valued when the value doesn't interest you?
The problem is so bad that the producers have to employ the vivacious Valerie Pringle to keep us from going to sleep by buzzing around the hall carrying on lively discussions of possessions with their owners. This is a role unknown to the other versions of the show. The British wouldn't think it proper to discuss them, and the Americans don't have to be encouraged to be interesting.
So why are they there? I toyed with the idea that they're there not because they have a burning desire to know the value of their items but because they think it's their duty. They're helping the national broadcaster produce a successful show. However, in the end I concluded they're not expressing emotion because it would be an example of what the Canadians fear most – irresponsibility.
The classes from which the British participants are drawn are those in which one represses one's emotions so that one does not lessen the appearance of authority one gives in the presence of the lower orders. In the United States you express your feelings because, well, it's a free country. In Canada, though, we are raised to be responsible. We don't get carried away because our first priority is to figure out the responsible thing to do. Perhaps one of the reasons Canadians respond so weakly is that they're already preoccupied by deciding how many bids to get for the insurance.
These generalizations would be worthless, of course, if they were not true in other areas of human interaction as well. But they are. Consider the issue of same-sex marriage. In the United States, even though there was no pressing need to deal with the issue, news that Canada was about to allow same-sex marriage led to widespread outrage and the organization of massive and successful political efforts to ban same-sex marriage beforehand. In the United Kingdom there was also no pressing demand for same-sex marriage, but the country eventually established not same-sex marriage but same-sex civil unions. The upper classes acted to defuse the issue while at the same time demonstrating that their tolerance was limited – homosexuals could be given certain privileges, but it must be made clear to them that they were limited concessions from authority rather than civil rights.
In Canada, there was a pressing need to deal with the issue – a court had ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry was unconstitutional, and the government stepped in to regulate it. Most straight Canadians, however, were completely uninterested in the issue. "I'm not homosexual," they seem to have thought, "so why should I worry my mind about it?" That is, they had no responsibility to exercise.
We also saw these differences in the respective national approaches to the invasion of Iraq. Americans responded to claims that Iraq posed or could pose a direct threat to the United States with a frenzy of jingoism which made opposition to it almost unthinkable. The British decided to maintain authority – their decision to support the war seems to have been based largely on their belief that if the United States led the war by itself its authority would be weakened. Most Canadians seem to have thought either "What a load of crap" or "Hey, we could get hurt."
And who's the happiest now, eh? Who's the happiest now? Well, no one. The Americans are getting unhappy, most Britons have been unhappy all along, but Canadians aren't actually happy. That wouldn't be Canadian. Instead they have quickly put that decision behind them and are responsibly considering what band of opportunists and ideologues they should hand the government of the country over to. Then they'll start getting their receipts ready so they can get their income tax filed early.
What the Roadshow Shows © John FitzGerald, 2005
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