Lovejoy has a lot to answer for. For all his roguish, lady-charming ways, it seems the TV show’s fast-and-loose style of antique trading has made an indelible impression on a generation of viewers.

“People can be very intimidated buying antiques,” says Kathryn Rayward, the face of a new BBC programme that rehabilitates vintage furniture and antiques with an emphasis on affordable opulence.

“It’s weird, because there’s this idea that the dealer’s trying to rip you off, when a lot of the time they’re very proud of the items they have for sale. We blame it on Lovejoy.”

Rayward grew up in Shoreham and is now happily settled near Uckfield with her young family. Cracking Antiques, which started in a prime-time slot on BBC2 earlier this month, brings together her career as an interior designer and her love of all things vintage, borrowed, found – but definitely not new. Each week, she and antiques boffin Mark Hill take the show’s volunteers around the nation’s flea markets and antiques fairs and re-style a room in their home using what they’ve found.

Rayward, who served her TV apprenticeship on a series of makeover shows, is keen to point out the dark days of Llewellyn Bowen and chums covering rooms in MDF will not be making a return.

In fact, she says she hopes the show will be seen as a response to some of the most recent offerings from lifestyle TV.

“During the past decade, shows like the House Doctor have been about getting rid of any colour or personality because the person buying the house might not like it, and we’re all living in these magnolia homes, frightened of expressing ourselves. Now we can’t sell our houses any more, we may as well make them look as we want them to! In times of crisis lots of innovative, thrifty things happen.”

Rayward encourages the guests on the show (who are trusting her and Hill with their own cash) to make use of family heirlooms and the items they already have to create the designs.

Looking around Rayward’s beautiful home, it’s clear she practices as she preaches; there’s an intriguing blend of old and older, inherited and bargained for. Finance, she says, is a driving factor.

“There’s a whole movement towards slow food, growing your own vegetables, taking the time to cook again and being thrifty. Design is also a part of that. My husband and I joke that we live in elegant economy” she laughs.

“Nothing we have is hugely expensive.

A big part of the show is about taking antiques off their pedestal and telling people they don’t have to be delicate things that go away in cupboards. Some of these things have been around for 150 years, and are from a time when things were built to last. I live with a six-year-old and a three-year-old quite happily with these things, and oddly enough we’re phasing out a lot of the newer stuff. Those are the things that get trashed or don’t survive the journey when we’ve moved.”

There will be people who are unconvinced, or put off by a perceived mystery in the world of antiques. Rayward says this can be overcome, even in the most stubborn cases.

“It can be very difficult persuading people to get off the high street and look for something different. Brighton’s a great place to do that because there are so many good places, and it genuinely is fun. You don’t get the chance to think about it for too long, or have a look online first, because it’ll soon be gone – you have to go with your heart a bit, because you only really regret the ones you don’t buy.”

She says there are fewer people out to rip you off than is widely believed.

“You can always negotiate with people, and all it takes is asking them: ‘What’s the best you can do on that?’. As long as you’re polite about it, people don’t mind you being a bit cheeky. There’s also room for negotiation if you can pay cash or you’re buying more than one item.”

Rayward herself is a regular at the Ardingly International Antiques And Collectors’ Fair. She’s lived in Sussex for much of her life, but left Shoreham for Nottingham, where she studied theatre design at university. After working in repertory theatre in Cheltenham on graduation, she branched out into interior design when she was made redundant, but her move into television was rather a happy accident. She and her ex-husband came under the withering gaze of Kevin McCloud for a Grand Designs special on Channel 4 that saw them renovating a 13th century farmhouse.

“My husband at the time hated colour and wanted it to be very medieval, but I’m Mrs Bling, so the whole hour of the show was just us having this battle,” she laughs.

Weren’t McCloud’s intrusive ways irritating? He has a habit of prying into finances and yammering on about the roof not being on when the guests are at their most despairing.

“Well I had a very silly schoolgirl crush on him, so I probably let that wash over me,” she laughs. “But he’d been a theatre designer as well and loves colour, so it was probably me and Kevin McCloud against my poor ex-husband!”

Rayward’s jolliness in adversity caught the eye of BBC Birmingham, who called her up and asked if she’d like to bring her interior design skills to their Real Rooms show. Spots on programmes such as House Call followed but over time, Rayward grew dissatisfied with the quick design fixes the shows required.

“It didn’t seem right to be chucking this stuff in people’s houses. I just thought ‘I don’t want to do this any more’.”

She and her second husband, who worked in TV production when they met (he’s now a writer), decided to up-sticks to South-West France for a while, where she “ate a lot of cake, drank a lot of wine” and spent a lot of time filling her battered Transit van with the furniture and decorative items the Ikea-loving locals had little interest in.

The family returned to England as the children approached school age, and Rayward soon began pitching the early ideas for Cracking Antiques to TV executive Daisy Goodwin, the grand dame of lifestyle programming who brought us Grand Designs, Property Ladder and Jamie’s Kitchen.

“If she’s behind a project, then it’s remarkable what can happen. I just pestered and pestered her for about two years!”

Her persistence has paid off, and the show now sits in a prime-time Wednesday-night slot.

She says she’s become firm friends with antiques expert Mark Hill, and she’s visibly excited as she shows me a copy of the hardback book that will accompany the series. Now, it’s a case of sitting tight and seeing whether people take the show to their hearts.

“You do put everything into it, and Mark and I are so close now we’d be devastated if we weren’t able to do it again.

“But I think people will like it – nine million people watch The Antiques Roadshow, so if we can get just some of those people interested in what we’re doing… The nation is ready for a new kind of design programme.”

* Cracking Antiques is on BBC2 at 8.30pm, Wednesday