Antiques Auction Shows on Television Reality television about antiques is available practically around the clock now, and half a dozen new shows have appeared in the past few months. But the transactions shown these days little resemble how the trade actually works. On ABC last month "The Great Big American Auction" starred Ty Pennington, the deeply tanned host of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." He spent a week gathering a dozen antiques and collectibles for sale. The Dallas company Heritage Auctions had the event filmed on the Queen Mary ocean liner, now a hotel and tourist attraction moored at Long Beach, Calif. Consignors stood awkwardly and sometimes tearfully onstage with Mr. Pennington, pleading for higher bids on 1880s currency, a meteorite chunk found in Kansas and 1930s checks signed by the baseball legend Ty Cobb. Celebrities, including Janice Dickinson, the former model, and Stan Lee, the comic-book tycoon, were sprinkled around the packed hall. The auctioneer, Vanessa Thanos, describes herself on her Web site as "a young, attractive and energetic host to liven up your next event." Her patter was flashier and more sentimental than the auction-house norm. She described a sports car as a "chick magnet," and when bids flagged for an American paratrooper's inherited copy of the Warren Commission report, she told the crowd, "Not to give you a guilt trip, but this is for our country." On the History channel's new series "Real Deal" consignors bring in objects for evaluation and then choose between a dealer's cash offer in advance and the unpredictability of a sale at Don Presley Auction in Orange, Calif. During the cash-offer sessions dealers fan out stacks of bills on a poker table in a back room. No one much mentions basic industry practices like price research, provenance, scientific materials analysis or auction-house premiums. "I like different things in my store," a dealer says simply, upon offering $1,000 for a set of three New Guinea gourds wrapped in straps and mesh and said to be from a cannibal tribe. The owner turns down the cash. The vessels sell at Presley for $390 after the auctioneer announces, "These gourds are believed to have been made from human skin and blood." This summer the "Antiques Roadshow" producers will present a PBS spinoff with the working title "Market Wars," billed as "a lesson in the bare-knuckles business of scoring a bargain." On casting calls for "Market Wars" in the trade papers, the headline taunts: "Think you know everything about antiques? Prove it! The news release says that producers will send antiques professionals on long trips, "foraging for items and taking them to auction." The experts will be "pitted against the clock, a budget and each other," and the highest earner wins "bragging rights for toppling his peers." The "American Idol" producers are also working on an antiques series, slated for the Discovery channel and tentatively titled "Final Offer." Advertisements show spotlights raking dark slits, resembling entryways for subterranean chambers at the Roman Colosseum. The ad headline: "Behind Every Door is a Serious Buyer." When asked for more disclosure, a Discovery spokeswoman wrote a five-word e-mail: "No info at this time." Vintage drawings of stage costumes survive in paltry numbers since theater, dance and opera companies usually focused on staying in business and planning new shows rather than filing paperwork. The Leonard Fox gallery in Manhattan spent three years gathering sketches, paintings and prints of early-20th-century performers" outfits for an exhibition, "Costume Design: Fantasy into Fashion," through Feb. 29. The staff found hundreds of images made for European productions, dating back to 1905 or so (with prices mostly in the few-thousand-dollar range). Some pages came from big-name artists. The gallery is offering Georges Barbier's suggestions for ruffled courtesans" gowns, Natalia Goncharova's watercolors of plumed and veiled ballerinas, and Sonia Delaunay's designs for cardboard cutouts that actors stood behind, frozen, in the Dadaist play "The Gas-Operated Heart" ("La Coeur à Gaz"). Little-known productions also turned up in the gallery's research. In the 1940s, while Paris was still cleaning up the rubble from World War II, the French designer Raymond Fost drew Andalusian peasant costumes for an operetta with a happy ending about a love affair between a toreador and an innkeeper's daughter. There's a Ukrainian folk saying: "It is shameful to give away a daughter without a kilim." Until World War II brides would stash kilims, a kind of flat-woven rug, in their dowry chests. Housewives draped the prized textiles over tables and hung them on walls rather than let them be trampled underfoot. The colorful wool weavings were used as badges of honor and wealth in funeral ceremonies, wrapped around corpses and hearse sleighs. The Ukrainian Museum in the East Village has brought out three dozen geometric and floral textiles from its collection for an exhibition that opens Feb. 12, "Ukrainian Kilims: Journey of a Heritage." A few date back to the 18th century, but most show how early 20th-century weavers snuck some Modernism into traditional patterns. Avant-garde painters bought and studied antique kilims in the countryside. They also designed updated versions with pale Scandinavian palettes and Cubist grids and lightning bolts. In a western Ukraine workshop run by the ethnographer Mykhailo Kurylenko, the weavers revived natural dyes made from fruit and bark. After the Soviets took over they razed Kurylenko's factory, and he vanished into the prison camp system. His dye formulas have been forgotten. "The secret died with him," said Lubow Wolynetz, the museum's curator of folk art. Ukrainian émigrés in the United States have donated about 200 kilims to the museum over the years. Many had stashed the fabrics in their luggage as they fled invading armies: the short fibers are easy to fold, and the wool content made them adaptable into warm emergency bedding. In refugee camps in Germany and Austria after World War II, Ms. Wolynetz said, Ukrainians would set up displays of the weavings they had saved. "The first thing they did was something cultural," she said. They can't just pine or cry. It was a way to show we're here, we exist.