Yesterday I watched the BBC Antiques Road Show from the National Maritime Museum on iPlayer. They produced a big steel sea chest that the presenter, Fiona Bruce, said that it was very old and hadn’t been opened in living memory because no-one could undo the two built in locks.

Now I found that hard to believe because over the last few generations there must have been some locksmith somewhere who could open it. Fiona Bruce went on to say that they had found someone who could and would open it during the show.

Subsequent clips showed the locksmith filing, making and trying the keys which I suspect were already finished but they were waiting until the end of the show to find out what had been hidden in the strongbox for the last hundred years. Ms Bruce stated that something was rattling inside whenever the box was moved and it probably contained treasure.

At last the great moment arrived. The two massive keys were slowly turned, one at a time. The crowd surged forward to get a better look. The handle slowly turned and the lid was opened to reveal . . . nothing!

Well, not quite. There was one small item that had been causing the rattling noise for the past god-knows-how-many years. Fiona Bruce learnt forward and picking it up she held it aloft to show the watching crowd.

It was a broken red BIC ballpoint pen cap!
True!
I kid you not. These pens first became available in 1950.
Now this presents a real life mystery. Did some time-traveller from the future, or from the BBC, go back in time and remove the gold and jewels from the box, and accidently drop the top of his pen into the box before locking it and throwing the keys into the sea? OR did he bring the keys back to our time and pretend to be a locksmith to retrieve the top to his BIC Cristal pen from the box?

I have always said that reality and ‘spontaneous interview’ TV programmes are carefully scripted and rehearsed beforehand. There is certainly a lot of truth in the following video.