New Statesman: Sale of the century: Andrew Billen detects dodgy arithmetic in a series of documentar

Having mastered, with David Dickinson and his imitators, the bottom end of the resale business--the car-boot sale--television this month turned to its top. Previous documentaries about auctioneers' houses have concentrated on the scandals and scams staged by these barrow boys in double cuffs and have tended to ignore the excitement of the auctions themselves--oddly so, as they feature frequently in dramas. Dramatically, an auction pursues a double outcome and answers two questions: who will win, and how much will they pay to do so? I'm surprised there isn't an auction-house equivalent of Court TV.

The first of BBC2's new series Highest Bidder (Thursdays, 9.50pm) concerned itself with the 1998 sale at Sotheby's in New York of the contents of Villa Windsor, the Parisian mansion that Edward VIII chose over Buck House. The programme was very interested in prices. A galloping price-tag graphic told us how much each item raised: $24,150 for Edward's and Wallis Simpson's gambling chips, $12,300 for their bed linen, and a startling $26,000 for a slice of their wedding cake. The sale, which auctioneers had estimated would generate between $5m and $6m, clocked up $23m. We were kept in such suspense about the final figure that I could not decide in the end who was more vulgarly interested in it, the auctioneers or the programme-makers.

Fortunately, the latter were even more fascinated by the buyers. The wedding cake went to a "Chinese-American surrealist", Benjamin Yim, also described in the subtitles as a "conceptual artist", who presumably agreed with the auctioneer, David Redden, when he said that with auctions of this sort you are "selling an idea"." It's a concept," Redden kept telling us, as if we would not otherwise understand that these objects acquired ninetenths of their value through their association with the biggest royal story of the century. Yim kept his slice of cake behind glass. "This will be the holy grail of all pastry," he said, conceptually.

The programme also struck lucky with the folk who bought the old bed sheets, Frederica and Michael Lam. These two Americans were celebrity doll designers, their speciality a Princess Diana doll with a hook-nose and a rictus grin. Their grand idea was to attach a quarter-inch square of Windsor linen to the hem of each Mini Di, exponentially raising its value. The resulting profits would "feed and inoculate all the children in the world".

"I said, 'What's a child's life worth? Go for it'," said Mrs Lam of the day the sheets kept going up in value while her husband bid on the phone. They found a comforting irony in the idea that the childless royal couple's matrimonial linens (there were rumours of a medical problem, said Lam) would now be helping children. I would like to have been told whether the Lams themselves were with issue--and, also, who did their arithmetic. "Major" inoculations cost 14 cents, they claimed, and there were 40 million children to inoculate. By my maths, they would have to sell 100,000 tiny Dianas at a profit of $56 each ...

But mildly eccentric though Yim and the Lams proved, the programme lost its will to sneer at everyone else midway through. Most of the buyers were not particularly odd or awful. Rick Patrick, a painter, bought the gambling chips in order to play poker with them. Jimmy Rodriquez, a South Bronx nightclub owner, framed the lederhosen the duke wore to meet Adolf Hitler in order to publicise and decorate his club. Redden himself bought a glass goblet celebrating the coronation that never happened. Symbolically, it had been smashed and then glued together by the duke. Even Robert Lacey, the royal biographer who came to the sale looking for a final chapter full of comic bathos for a book on the Windsors, ended up buying the bathroom scales of the woman who is believed to have said that you could never be too rich or too thin.

The producer, Don Boyd, hired the rough-hewn actor Douglas Henshall to do the voice-over, and his script took every opportunity to mock the Windsors as "royal shopaholics who hoarded on a gargantuan scale" and as collectors of "bric-a-brac and kitsch". But who wouldn't want to own a piece of their lives? When Zoe Harrington-Brooks, from a Kansas City shopping mall, squeezed into the duke's scarlet jacket and announced she was an American size two, you realised what a tiny, epicene man he was. I'd count hers as neither ghoulish interest nor base acquisitiveness, nor even superstition (much was made of the objects being treated like holy relics), but something verging on historical curiosity.

Entertaining and occasionally inspired though this one was, I actually prefer the second programme in the series, which is about the sale of a mysteriously doctored first edition of Alice in Wonderland. David Jeffcock's film is actually much more about Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell than it is about the auction: more about the book than the sale. In a sense, it fits in less well with the series brief; but by explaining the historical value of the book, it lets us sympathise with the enthusiasm of the buyers. The first Highest Bidder gave the impression that it knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. And I'll be back after two telly-less weeks in France to rediscover the value of British TV.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times