Broadcaster who presented the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow for 19 years
The broadcaster Hugh Scully, who has died aged 72, was best known as the presenter of the Antiques Roadshow on BBC television. He was typically self-effacing in his explanation of the programme’s success in reaching up to 15 million viewers during the 19 years that he presented it, from 1981: it was the people who brought items for identification and evaluation that gave the show “colour, charm, interest, anecdote and humour. We share their triumphs and their disappointments.” Though he laid no claim to being an expert himself, Hugh was an enthusiastic collector, as was his wife, Barbara (nee Dean), whom he married in 1966.
His start with the BBC, reading radio news in Southampton in 1963, came after he wrote to the corporation claiming he had been the Paris correspondent for the International Herald Tribune. In fact, he had hawked copies of the paper on a street corner while admiring journalists drinking every evening at a cafe near the Arc de Triomphe. “That’s a good life!” he thought, and, in typically enterprising fashion, went after it for himself.
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