THE Antiques Roadshow has an awful lot in common with the National Lottery. We feel we have to keep an eye on it.

Just as we look to see if our numbers, or the numbers we would have chosen if we'd bought a ticket, have come up, so we watch the treasures brought in by the huge queues which form everywhere the roadshow puts up its parasols.

This could be the week we're going to strike lucky and see the double of granny's old jug hailed as find of the show.

In common with the lottery, of course, we never do hit the jackpot - but hope springs eternal ...

Hope springs, that is, until you are an executor, charged with disposing of the contents of someone else's house. Then dread begins to lurk in every drawer and cupboard, even when you've no reason to expect hidden treasures.

I blame that roadshow. We've all seen people take in some priceless piece of porcelain that's been kicking around at home as an umbrella stand.

Sir and I have spent most of the past summer executoring, or whatever the right word is, a property which was, depending on the state of the traffic, 80 minutes or 3 hours' drive away.

When we locked the door for the last time, dread must have sneaked into the car with us, hiding in the last few boxes in the back.

After 30 large, heavy-duty bin bags; two-thirds of a five-tonne skip, three estate-car loads of charity shop stock and one of jumble, we were down to those last boxes of unblemished crockery and glass.

Back at home, we got down to a proper look at what we'd carefully wrapped in newspaper and boxed.

If all this was from the immediate family, we might know its history, or even the sort of "grandma always said it was worth a bit" legend that grows up around family pieces, and be wary. It isn't and, though I was a frequent visitor, much of the really old stuff I hadn't seen.

I suspect it originally belonged, or had even been wedding presents, to the previous generation. Anything of theirs must qualify as antique, if we take the 100-year-old rule, but that definition doesn't automatically mean "of value" or - the magic word - "collectable".

Then there's the newer pieces, with overtones of Art Deco (maybe) and early and (possibly) collectable plastics.

In the wakeful small hours, dread suggested we could have chucked into the skip an apparently battered but even so saleable bit of pottery. Worse, would someone pick up, at a jumble sale or charity shop, a knick-knack I or - far, far more worrying - the other legatees will recognise, in a couple of years' time, as David Battye or Henry Sandon says incredulously: "How much did you pay for that?" before quoting them a gasp-inducing value.

I turned to the public library's reference section. To my great relief, nothing appeared to carry the right marks except for one small piece, but none of the books showed that particular pottery making that type of design.

Time for the internet. Oh yes, I found the design pictured, although it was on candlesticks, not a vase. Oh dear, it was on a museum's web site but seemed to have no information with it. Oh no, the vase was one of a pair and the other, cracked and seriously chipped, had gone in the skip.

Time for the experts, I think. But we hesitate. It could be that the pottery had a sideline in fairground prizes and that's what we've got; it could be a fake. Is it worth it for one item?

What we really need, of course, is the Antiques Roadshow rolling into town. Henry Sandon would break the bad news gently and with humour.