One tale has captured the hearts of the nation of late: the plight of Paul Cattermole. Famous (well… yeah, sure) for being The One Out of S Club 7 Who Left to Join a Nu Metal Band™, Paul has since fallen on harder times (nu metal did not, sadly, work out), so he’s decided to sell a couple of items from his past in order to get back on track. Those items are his BRIT Awards.
Paul was awarded two BRITs over the course of his illustrious career with S Club: one in 2000 for Best British Breakthrough Artist and one in 2002 for Best Single (with “Don’t Stop Movin’,” which, fair play). Nice memorabilia for times gone by as they might be, Paul had a brainwave: he could be housing a pair of veritable goldmines. Why should they gather dust on his shelf, or prop open doors, when they could be swapped for fat stacks of cash? Abz from 5ive sold his for a million, right? Well, not actually, because the buyer pulled out, but the idea was briefly there at least. Maybe Paul could be a millionaire.
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But there is a bit of an issue. Turns out that selling a BRIT Award is quite difficult, mostly because nobody seems to know how much the fucking things are worth. Paul’s initial eBay attempt to flog his Best British Breakthrough Artist gong looked pretty good: the successful bidder promised a generous £66,000 for the award, but the sale was later thwarted when the buyer failed to cough up. So because S Club were good and we are nice, we decided to help him along by finding out a BRIT’s official value. Should be easy, right? We’d just call up some auction houses and get a few neat figures for a quick, lol-sy blog. Simples, just like the funny TV meerkat says! Haha.
This is not what happened.
We write this now, two weary, dry-soled travellers. Our quest to find out how much a BRIT award is worth was not straightforward. It was weeks-long, and extremely arduous, and mostly hopeless – antique dealers, true to their profession, appear to abhor computer technology and indeed phones. Anyway we eventually got a sort of approximate value and are basically just writing this up now because we can’t be arsed anymore. Here is our story:
Attempt #1-infinity: Ringing everywhere we could find on Google
Like all good journalists, we’ve got a nose for a story and an internet connection and we’re gonna use them, baby! We set out – fresh-faced and ready to make some #memorable #content – and attempted to track down a few different antiques experts for a quick quote. Turns out that all the ones we tried to contact either: a) refused to answer their phones or emails literally ever (the honourable pursuit of antiques is more important, clearly), or; b) wanted money for a valuation and we were on a budget and also didn’t actually have access to the BRIT award we wanted to know the price of. This, apparently, would not be the easy task we had hoped.
Attempt #36 or something: Finally, a response!
Eventually, someone answered one of our desperate emails. The search had been so fruitless thus far that we yelped at our desk on receipt of an actual response, which is quite pathetic really isn’t it, when you think about it? We had, finally, found an antiques expert who owns a phone and/or computer: Timothy Langston of Fine Art & Antiques, who gave us an idea of what we were dealing with, but still couldn’t pin down a price. Here’s what he had to say:
“A BRIT Award would likely only be of interest to a specialist collector or a super fan of Paul Cattermole. The gesture of putting it on eBay may attract enough publicity to raise the value of the object which itself would be unlikely to be worth a vast amount. So it is hard to give you a figure – but a collector may be willing to spend a three or four figure sum given the publicity!”
We had to keep going.
Attempt #I don’t fucking know: Google, again
By some blessed stroke of luck and a good amount of digging (we were, at this point, like BRIT award Nancy Drews), we happened to track down a listing from a 2015 auction by Ewbank Auctions. This auction concerned the sale of a statuette awarded to Tim Byrne, a manager for the pop group A1, in 2001, also for Best British Breakthrough Act. This is basically the closest thing you can get to Paul Cattermole’s actual award. The guide price for the item was between £1,500 and £2,500, though it eventually sold for only £750.
So, not quite a cool million, unfortunately.
Attempt #exhausted: Alastair McCrea – Ewbank Auctioneers
Finally, we got to the truth, or at least round the corner from it. Having discovered Ewbank’s listing, we immediately set about contacting them for more information. After a couple of days, we heard back from Alastair McCrea, who professes to have recently gone on the radio to discuss the topic of celebrities flogging their BRIT statuettes on eBay (thus he is a proper expert.) He told us via email:
“On some research I carried out an Oasis award sold for £8,750, and a Pulp Fiction soundtrack award went for £1,058. I really can’t see an S Club 7 award being worth more than that but it’s only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.” Yikes.
He also included those hyperlinks, for which we’d like to thank him, because it was very helpful.
So, finally, there you have it. A BRIT award – and specifically Paul Cattermole’s 2000 S Club 7 BRIT award for Best British Breakthrough Act – is worth somewhere between £1,058, and £8,750, although in practice it might go for as little as £750, as Tim Byrne discovered back in 2015. Equally, if someone was actually willing to pay £66k, then that BRIT award would indeed be worth £66k. Probably not though, in our now expert view. Anyway, we’re knackered so we’re going for a nap. Cheers.
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