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Could a doorstop turn out to be a Henry Moore worth £1m? It’s just one of the cases in a new series of Fake Or Fortune?

Andrew Preston Fake Or Fortune?, Wed, 9pm, BBC1.

Our 52-page guide includes Jaci Stephen’s Soap Watch, your Movie Planner plus a sneak preview of the priceless stories in the ninth series of Fake Or Fortune?

We’ve all dreamt of finding a lost masterpiece at a car boot sale or getting one for a song at auction, but you don’t expect to stumble upon a possible gem while gardening.

That’s exactly what happened to Neil Betts in 1987 when his strimmer kept hitting something as he was clearing a bramble-covered back garden in Norfolk. The sculpture he found is the subject of the first episode of a new series of BBC1’S Fake Or Fortune?, as Philip Mould and Fiona Bruce set out to see if it’s a lost work by master sculptor Henry Moore.

Neil and his wife Barbara named the abstract work ‘Henry’ after an art historian friend pointed out that it looked like Moore’s work. But since they found it, Henry’s acted as a doorstop and found himself back in the garden as a water feature. ‘I did look into melting him down,’ admits Barbara. ‘I weighed him to see how much he was worth and it was £50.’ The stakes are high now though, because if Henry was made by Henry Moore he could be worth up to £1 million.

Even though this is the ninth series, and on top of Antiques Roadshow running since 1979, the unusual and potentially highly valuable finds still keep appearing. ‘We get a couple of thousand proposals after each series, which we whittle down,’ says art dealer Philip. ‘But this first one had me intrigued from the start. It’s only the second sculpture we’ve done, and it had a real presence.’

While Fiona focuses on documentary evidence to uncover the provenance of a work, Philip says he tends to concentrate on the technical side, which here means trying to work out what material the sculpture is made of. This takes him to Moore’s former home at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, where his extraordinary studio is still full of pebbles, stones, fossils and bones he collected, and tiny models of some of his famous sculptures.

‘It’s almost as if he’s left for a cup of tea and is about to return,’ says Philip. ‘All around you can

see the sparks that led to epoch defining images.’

This series also investigates a piece that may be by Benjamin West, who worked for George III, which was found on ebay. There’s a painting that could be by Landseer, a favourite of Queen Victoria, that was thought to be lost from the Tate Gallery after a flood. And there’s a painting of a praying man which was rejected as being by Orientalist artist Gérôme by a leading authority who has now died, a verdict the team will try to overturn.

‘By the end of a programme you will have taken on board a huge amount of art history by stealth,’ says Philip. ‘We bring jeopardy to the process of art history and that’s what people like to watch.’ ◼

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