Firetop

At 5:30am on Sunday, having loaded our vehicle the day before, we drove down to Dorking Station to set up our stall for the car boot sale and sell lots of items recently superseded by newer wedding gifts. It’s still dark at that time, but that doesn’t stop the keenest bargain hunters armed with torches, grabbing things whilst you unload and set up. We’d expected this early-arrival hassle – it goes with the territory… but what we hadn’t expected was for BBC1’s daytime classic ‘Car Booty’ to set up a pitch right opposite ours.

If you’ve never caught Car Booty on BBC1, it’s a show hosted by Lorne Spicer whereby she and ‘expert valuer’ Mark Franks visit a family’s house to try and find expensive items to sell at a car boot sale. For me the whole idea behind the show is fundamentally flawed because most people attending car boot sales tend to take less than £10 to spend, and subsequently try and buy items for under £1. However, I watched one episode of Car Booty where they took an antique train set worth £200 to sell… and somebody suspiciously turned up and bought it without even haggling. There’s definitely a certain type of person who buys just to get on camera though if what we saw was anything to go by.

One of the best filming moments I observed involved a man innocently trying to buy something from the car maintenance trader, and Lorne Spicer and her film crew backed into him whilst she waffled on camera… the cameraman got a bit funny with this poor man who had done nothing but stand still and look at a stall. Anybody would think that they were filming a movie epic from the way this cameraman reacted. When they did the second take they were about to repeat the incident, the stall customer saw them coming, got visibly distressed and stormed off – leaving the trader one sale down.

The Car Booty pitch opposite ours was being run by a group of ladies called ‘Surrey Harmony Barbershop Chorus’ who all wore bright orange jumpers with ‘Surrey Harmony’ emblazoned across the front. Their stall looked typically ‘Mark Franks’ – lots of brass items, old weighing scales and mainly antique collectables, presumably from a range of the ladies’ houses. They were surrounded at all times by cameramen, men wielding large furry microphones and not so many customers. Periodically they would all come together and sing harmonies across the car park – as if the cameras weren’t already attracting enough attention. By their fifth song I started to wonder if they were actually filming a joint ‘Songs of Praise meets Car Booty’ show. I loaded a short singing clip onto YouTube.

We were pretty grateful for being so close to this stall, curious car boot customers came in abundance and we made our best ever £100 total. My wife will tell you that I like to treat a car boot stall like a military sales exercise – defining key areas like ‘computing, cars, kitchen, clothing’ to maximise the eye catching factor as people flit past. It’s also a good idea NOT to start knocking down your prices before 9am; many a “Will you take £3 for this� was met with a glance at my watch and a “hmmmm, nope sorry it’s too early to knock things down yet� to which the customer responds by paying full whack anyway. You do laugh however at people who say “50p? That’s a bit too much� and put down the mint condition DVD player.

I managed to find out, from one of the walkie-talkie types co-ordinating the BBC filming, that Car Booty were filming three separate sales stalls, not in competition, but for three separate shows. In exchange we told him all about the Dorking Cock, and advised him to make sure he made a few references to it on Car Booty (he hadn’t seen it on the way in).

The odds of Suzie_Q and I not making it onto BBC1 albeit for 2 seconds, having been in such close proximity and also having had cameramen film transactions taking place at our own stall are slim. If anybody unemployed gets to spot these episodes in the coming months please send me an email

 

Technorati Tags: car booty, bbc1, lorne spicer, mark franks, antiques, collectables, dorking, car boot sale

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