Channel 4's 'Four Rooms'

I was recently contacted by a researcher from a production company that makes the Four Rooms program for Channel 4. He told me that his producer had seen my 'And When I'm a Man' sculpture and wondered if I'd be interested in bringing it along to the show and seeing if I could sell it to one of their 'dealers'. 

Okay, I admit that I do dip into a bit of on-line telly (English English (UK speak) for TV) now and again but because of its addictive qualities I decided to throw my television set away years ago. Consequently, I'm a bit out of touch with a lot of the new programmes – Four Rooms being one of them. So I looked on Channel 4's site and Four Rooms appears to be something of a cross between Dragons Den and the Antiques Road Show. The basic premise seems to be that contestants come onto the show with an item of interest (previous examples being things like Winston Churchill's gold dentures, Napoleon's death mask, a Marilyn Monroe self-portrait etc.) and haggle over their items with the show's four dealers. They choose the order that they meet the dealers and if they don't like the first dealer's offer they say no and move onto the next one, and so on until they finally accept or decline an offers. The hook of the program is that once the contestant has moved onto another dealer they can't accept a previous dealer's offer even if that was the better one. 

Anyway – I told the researcher that I no-longer owned the sculpture but I did put them in touch with Andrew Dawood who has it on display at his practice, Dawood and Tanner, in Marylebone, West London. Andrew agreed to go on the show so when the day of the shoot came along I helped him to transport the sculpture over to the studio. As the owner of the sculpture, Andrew got to do all the nerve-racking in front of the camera stuff while I spent the day sat in the green room eating cakes, drinking tea and chatting to the other contestants (sometimes it's a hard life being an artist). Having previously worked on Channel 4's Embarrassing Bodies programmes, I'm sure that Andrew was fine being filmed so I'm looking forward to checking out the show when it airs some time in the next couple of months or so. As soon as I find out when that is, I'll let you know.