Bargain Hunt LIVE!

Having been a Bargain Hunt expert for the past five years I still find it exciting and great fun to do a live Show. When the series producer Linda Cleve called me and said, "We have got another week of lives Michael do you want to get involved?" I jumped at the opportunity.

Before long I was in Builth Wells in Wales at an antiques fair with my team.

I always travel the night before so I can catch up with the other expert David Barby. The production team have been with Bargain Hunt for many series so it's nice to see them all. In the hotel we sit and have dinner, everyone together having a few bottles of wine and discussing the plan of action for the following days filming.

It is always an early start. We normally leave the hotel about 8 in the morning and get to the antiques fair by 8.30 just in time for the traders who are setting up their stalls.

We meet our teams for the first time. My team were a couple who were into amateur dramatics so with that in mind I knew we'd have a fun day. The next step is to search around the fair and do some buying. Contrary to popular belief we really do only have one hour to do all our buying. One of the runners follows, timing you. You are not allowed even five minutes extra, they are really that strict. We scoured the fair for bargains but it was difficult to find anything really exciting until we came across the 1952 German trolley. Passion took over on the item for me and almost immediately I realised that perhaps I had paid too much for it, but I just could not resist the strong modernist design. Once I had been wax lyrical about the trolley with my team they agreed it was a good thing to buy. As we left the stall I could have kicked myself for paying £130 for a trolley which really was only worth £80 on a good day. Well that's Bargain Hunt for you, you get wrapped up in that spur of the moment passion for something and you have just got to have it.

Next stop saw us finding a lovely silver clock. I spotted this in the corner of a stall and pointed it out to my team who were not sure whether they should buy it or not, so we moved on and looked around for other items. The lady In my team saw a nice piece of 1960s studio Denby by Glen College. Being a lover of studio pottery I agreed that it was a good buy as we would be selling the items in a Bristol saleroom and so would be collectors of studio ware there. Time was running out for my team so Michael my other team member decided he would go back for the Elkington Silver clock. With our three items secured the next step was to try to make a profit at the auction sale.

Two weeks before the auction sale was due to take place I received an email informing me that we were no longer going to the trendy Bristol auction room, but were in fact going to Colin Young in Grantham. My chin dropped realising that they would never understand my modernist trolley up in Grantham!

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