Have you seen C4′s Four Rooms yet? It’s all about negotiation.

A new show has hit Channel 4 primetime: ‘Four Rooms’. 

A formulaic show, (but aren’t they all) which takes elements of Dragons’ Den, Antiques Roadshow and Cash in the Attic and smashes them together to give us a very slick looking ‘deal or no deal’ approach to unique items and collections.

At a mystery location in the capital (Shepherd’s Bush) a group of dealers, each experts in their own field will be faced with a varied array of objects on which they will make a bid.

First of all the punter speaks with Anita Rani (from BBC’s The One Show) and gives some background info about their piece or collection. They are then asked for a sale value, or rather an desired sale value. The premise of the show being whether the punter can achieve the value from the dealers.

The dealers, who are Jeff Salmon (Mr Nasty?), Gordon Watson (Mr Nice?), Andrew Lamberty (Mr GQ?) and Emma Hawkins (Ms Whiplash?), not only aim to do a deal and make a little cash, but also aim to no doubt make a name for themselves. Across this first series the dealers will build their own personal brand and hope, one assumes, to become the Duncan Bannantyne of the Antiques scene and not the David Dickinson of the car boot field.

From their four rooms the dealers appear for the first time to inspect the objets d’art, the collections and the simply curious. With no prior warning they poke, muse, umm and ahh the punter’s goods before said punter looking gets a chance to pitch their lifetime’s passion.

But you have to remember that they are not pitching Dragons’ Den style for an investment, but to get the dealers to make them an offer. After the pitch each dealer retires to their own white room, furnished with their own particular style (watch out for Emma’s Antlers!) and the punter enters each room.

However, the dealers do not know the order in which they are being seen so hopefully they make their strongest offer to outmanoeuvre the other dealers. The Punter will argue their case for a higher offer but once a deal is turned down and they have left the room, they are not allowed to return and therefore may have walked away from the best offer of the day.

There is no imperative to accept any offer but it will be interesting to see if any of the punters ‘cave’. They are up against experienced dealers, each of whom need to make some money as they pass the articles on to the own clients – at a generous margin no doubt.

So in each of the four rooms the negotiation begins, which is the crux of the show. It will be interesting to watch how different people negotiate, if at all. To see if people overvalue their belongings (on the whole we tend to do so) or see who the natural born salespeople are. Will the punters acknowledge that the dealers are simply middle men who want to flip the items as quickly and profitably as possible?

Will we see Punters sticking to their lowest acceptable offer or simply thinking ‘I have to sell today’? There are many key issues linked to successful negotiations and it will be interesting to see if we see some of those demonstrated across the coming weeks.

Also, many people will be watching the show obviously because of the randomness of the items on display and perhaps it will send us all scurrying to our garages, lofts and cellars to dig out that heirloom, car boot bargain or childhood Christmas gift still in its box and send us looking for a deal… or no deal.

You may wonder why I have dedicated an entire blog post to this show. Well, you’ll just have to wait and see…

Tagged as: Channel 4 Four Rooms, Comics, Negotiating, Selling