Baggage Battles
7Mate, Wednesday, 9.30pm
IMAGINE pitching this to TV executives 20 years ago.
“It’s a show about people who buy suitcases and other crap from airlines’ lost baggage collections. They see what they find and how much it is worth. That’s the show.“
Security would have been called halfway through the first sentence.
Fast forward to 2015 and Baggage Battles is a reality of reality TV, where there is nothing so mundane that it can’t be turned into a 30-minute timeslot filler.
Baggage Battles is no better or worse than many other shows where secondhand dealers fight for the right to unknown lots of goods or to snare a bargain from unsuspecting sellers.
Four dealers are followed during the auction, with their friendly rivalry a key part of the drama.
Unlike its cousin Auction Hunters, the bounty at the end of Baggage Battles isn’t often weird or wonderful, it’s just what you would expect to be found in lost luggage – clothes, books and personal items.
If only they found a kilo of uncut Columbian cocaine or a sheaf of Nazi bearer bonds being flown out of Paraguay – anything but retro shirts and cigarette boxes.
Like all reality shows, it’s hard not to think a little mustard is being added to the stories to spice things up. Actually, make that jalapeno sauce and wasabi paste. Imagine if all the items they bought ended up being nothing but a natty suitcase and a few moth-eaten undies. Not much of a show in that.
Instead, there is always a hidden gem, an unexpected item that could push the re-sale value through the roof.
These auction shows require a certain suspension of disbelief that everything in the suitcase, storage locker or country shed was there when the film crew arrived.
But whether grounded in reality or not, having a whole show based around the contents of a suitcase in a Cleveland lost luggage wharehouse is truly an unreal concept.
– Danny Buttler
