With a devoted audience, an eye for a bargain and a forthcoming visit to the North-East, Bargain Hunt presenter David Dickinson looks set to go from strength to strength. Steve Pratt meets the man as renowned for his personality as his presenting

THE next lot is a flamboyant figure, dated 1941, with a tanned face and impressive head of hair. He still works and can be seen regularly on BBC television. A very collectable item, something of a cult among housewives and students who make up the bulk of the daytime TV audience. The object's value is rising all the time with a move to prime-time imminent.

David Dickinson is one of those ordinary people, like Charlie (Water Feature) Dimmock, who know their subject inside out and whose cheerful, enthusiastic explanation of the facts endears them to viewers.

Dickinson, who acquired his knowledge of antiques while travelling the world as his singer wife Lorne Lesley's manager, was plucked from a Modern Times documentary to appear on The Antiques Show for BBC2. He presented a Channel 5 series before being snapped up by BBC1 for Bargain Hunt, the daily daytime show in which two teams are given £200 each to buy bargains that will hopefully make a profit at auction.

The series has healthy viewing figures of about 1.7m, good enough for the Beeb to commission eight programmes for screening in evening schedules this summer. "I've always been a little bit of a character, and what I've realised is that you must always be yourself," says Dickinson, who is presenting two live editions of Bargain Hunt from Tennant's auction rooms in Leyburn next week.

"I was given a good piece of advice by a director who taught me that the camera sees everything and magnifies it, for good or bad. It sticks out if people go on TV and fake it. If you are enjoying yourself, the camera sees that and magnifies that. I've taken to TV very easily in a sense. There's a lot of hard work but I'm presenting as me in an area I understand very well. It's a question of being your natural self." He would appear to be the genuine article, surprised and just a little bit flattered by all the attention that comes his way now. Appearances on Shooting Stars, Ruby Wax, Johnny Vaughan and Have I Got News For You in May have cemented his position as a bona fide TV personality. "People stop me in the street and at antique fairs continually. You feel a responsibility because it's been good to me, given me a very good living. There have been hundreds of thousands of hits on the website. People send me poems and pictures," he says. "So when I see people like Oasis sticking two fingers in the air, it annoys me. A few years ago, they were begging for coverage. It seems very ungrateful to me to behave like that. You need to put something back and I try, within reason, to give the public a certain amount of time."

He's keen to foster people's interest in antiques and collecting, to persuade them to go to antique fairs and auctions. His own free time is more limited now but he always keeps June free so he can attend the big international antique fair in London. His advice for beginners, gained through 25 years of buying and selling, is that quality stands the test of time. "Try to buy quality," he explains. "You can start off in a simple way. Go to a saleroom a few times to get the feel. Watch what happens and perhaps eventually you'll fancy a go." Dickinson himself, having acquired a taste for TV, is on the lookout for work that doesn't involve antiques. "I would like to do other things," he says. "I have a bit of a flair for interacting with people, so perhaps I could do a game show or documentary-type series."

* Bargain Hunt from Leyburn is on BBC1 at 11am on Tuesday and Wednesday.