I know in Britain you...

I know in Britain you have all kinds of shows where the public are the stars, from living together in a house and home improvement advice through to antique buying and selling at auction. Here, we have equally popular reality programmes, including one which not only attracts millions of viewers, but actually skews the second-hand car market single-handedly.

This year"s auction begins next week on 13 January, and runs through to the 21st

It"s called the annual Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Arizona. This year"s auction begins next week on 13 January, and runs through to the 21st. There are dozens of auctions throughout the year, and even other Barrett-Jackson sales, but this one alone has the power to alter car prices. And that"s because company boss Craig Jackson cut a deal several years ago with Speed TV, the largest auto-oriented cable TV network. The coverage began modestly, but the sale has become the network"s single largest event. This year, it will be live on air for an astounding 40 hours.

The coverage is also frequently rerun during the rest of the year. This past Christmas and New Year period, Speed TV aired the 2006 auction coverage again and - though almost a year old - viewer ratings were still high. I"ve been to Barrett-Jackson auctions several times, and the atmosphere is electric. Among the stunning lots up for sale this time are some with big celebrity links, such as a lime green 1939 Lincoln Zephyr coupé built for a concert tour by rock singer Alice Cooper. There"s also a series of appealing oddballs - a 450bhp Hummer produced for CNN, the news network, to cover the war in Iraq, and the 1978 Tupolev Gullwing all-terrain boat, made for the Russian military to recover back-to-earth cosmonauts in Siberia after completion of space flights.

Although the sale begins on a Tuesday afternoon, the TV coverage kicks in later in the week. Jackson programs the auction like a master showman - the best, sexiest vehicles are reserved for TV"s prime time, building to a crescendo on Saturday and Sunday, when a laundry list of one-of-a-kind cars will cross the auction block. Those Saturday-night cars include a pair of 1954 Dodge Firearrow concepts built by Ghia in Italy, a stunning supercharged 1937 Cord and a flawless 1930 Duesenberg. Besides the appeal of the vehicles themselves - offered at "no reserve", which means all 1,200 vehicles will be sold, regardless of the price they bring - the auction makes for good viewing, because it often pits one rich bidder against another.

And the auctioneers, who have become TV stars in their own right, feed the frenzy. Bid high enough, they seem to urge, and you too can become a TV celebrity - at least for a minute.

So how has this skewed the collector car market? Because after the auction airs, I invariably get calls from readers who are convinced that the rusting 1978 Chevrolet Camaro or Jaguar in their back garden is now worth ,000, instead of the 0 they will really fetch. They have just seen Camaros and Jags on TV going for 0,000, and surely theirs is worth a lot too, right?

Wrong. However, with 40 hours of television trying to convince them otherwise, I plan to take the phone off the hook after this year"s auction!

Steven Cole Smith lives and works in the US, and is the motoring correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune