The Rural We: Dan Farrell
He's responsible for bringing the hit series "Antiques Roadshow" to PBS.
Old Chatham, New York resident Dan Farrell is the originator and consulting producer of the PBS television series Antiques Roadshow. He also runs Daniel Farrell Art Advisory and Appraisal Services, a consulting firm that specializes in art advisor services, valuation services and insurance claim work. Although it’s been 23 years since Antiques Roadshow debuted, he still travels with the show for every episode. Here he tells how he developed the project, and how those high-value “reveals” happen.
I grew up in Westfield, Mass., and after college and grad school went to London and got another degree at the London School of Economics. I worked for a major bank in London and LA and moved back and forth between the UK and the US for a while, ending up in western Massachusetts.
I was doing financial consulting with people in the film industry. The second time I was based in London, I ended up buying the rights to the BBC Antiques Roadshow. They were only too happy to make a deal with me. I bought the rights in perpetuity; looking back it, it was quite a coup.
But it wasn’t an overnight success in this country. I spent 15 years trying to get the show on air. Since I was unsuccessful at first, I took a job running a publishing and distribution company for an English company called Antique Collectors Club, which kept me in touch with authors and experts in the antiques business. Finally it all came together and we actually started taping our first season in 1996. Since that time I’ve been very involved, traveling with the show and hanging out with all these wonderful people from auction houses and dealers, experts of every stripe. I realized I liked what they were doing better than what I was doing, so I became an appraiser myself — I took formal course work at NYU and Christie’s to get accredited. So now, besides doing the show, I do appraisals for insurance, estate, gift and donation purposes.
Each show is a real event. When we announce what cities we’ll be going to through local PBS affiliates, we ask people to apply for tickets, and demand always exceeds our capacity. Sometimes we get 20,000 to 30,000 applications. We have about 75 appraisers at each venue, and we’ll get four to six thousand people coming through. Everybody that comes in is allowed to bring two items. Out of all those people, if the experts see something they think is special, they check in with the producers to get the person on air. We start each roadshow at 7:30 a.m. and go to 7:30 p.m., and get three one-hour shows out of each one.
For the last couple of years we’ve traveled to five cities. We’ve moved away from doing the shows in convention centers to historic sites and museums because visually it’s just much more appealing.
It’s been a great ride, and I’m glad it’s still going on. BBC is still doing their show. It’s the highest-rated prime time series PBS has ever had, and I don’t see any reason we can’t continue going on. In November we’ll broadcast the 500th episode.
I love working. I’m never bored, always just perfectly happy to be working. A few years ago my wife and I moved to Old Chatham from East Hampton and we couldn’t be happier with the choice we made.
