WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. -- It may be the twilight of the British Empire, but around the world the faithful are determinedly carrying on, trying to forget that they ever heard of Squidgy or Budgie or even Camilla Parker-Bowles. Noblesse oblige requires them to honor the civilized past, as trying as conditions may be in Delhi, Ottawa, Hong Kong or Wappingers Falls, N.Y.

Wappingers Falls?

A colonial outpost of substantial proportions has mushroomed in the former factory town on the Hudson River, just south of Poughkeepsie in IBM country and 70 miles north of the Vatican of publishing, New York City. Carrying the flag - two flags, actually - is Dan Farrell, vice president and general manager of Antique Collectors' Club, Ltd. The American-born, British-educated banker-turned-bookseller has "grown the business," as Clintonites like to say, from a modest $500,000 a year to $3,000,000 in 1996. For Farrell, such empire building was a roundabout way of getting his own show on the road, as deftly strategic and obstinate a move as General Eisenhower's North African Campaign.

Farrell's show is the Chubb's Antiques Roadshow, an American version of the popular BBC production. The bookseller slyly refers to it as "This Old Stuff," a nod to the home improvement program that was a hit for Farrell's producer, public television station WGBH in Boston. In June, WGBH will start shooting in locations around the country. The 13, one-hour installments will begin airing in January 1997, promising a tantalizing bit of celebrity for an industry long relegated to the broom closet of mass entertainment.

Antiques Collectors' Club, which was founded in Suffolk, England, in 1966 by Diana and John Steel, collectors frustrated by the lack of literature on their specialties, publishes books for Anglophiles on fine and decorative arts, architecture and gardening. The scholarly works are produced with taste and precision, making up for in content what Abrams and Abbeville may exceed in lush color photography.

It was late winter when Farrell agreed to meet me at Antique Collectors' Club's United States headquarters. Snow clouds hung oppressively over "the bleachery," as townsfolk refer to the Dickensian collection of brick mill buildings that houses Antique Collectors' Club and about 30 others. Antique Collectors' Club was introduced to the unlikely spot by Apollo Books, publisher of Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers.

Books were stacked from ceiling to floor inside the warehouse, but not even a complete series of Gertrude Jekyll gardening guides could force a suggestion of spring into the chilly loft. Against the far wall were several small offices and a conference room; heated, fortunately, and used by Antique Collectors' Club's skeleton staff of 11.

"How I came to this speaks to the end subject," Farrell says in a voice that, despite a heavy cold, is as deep and rich as a radio announcer's. His current commute from his home in Westfield, Mass., to the Hudson River seems brief compared to the years he spent shuttling from coast to coast and continent to continent.

The company's small conference room is furnished with odds and ends picked up at auction and yard sales. "It's a signed piece, definitely 40s, early for that kind of material," Farrell says, glancing at an early modern cabinet that is wedged between wall and table. Behind him is a Balinese batik acquired at Pioneer Auction in Amherst, Mass., more evidence that the executive's interest in recycling goes well beyond recasting British television in an American idiom.

"I lived in England for about five years," he says. From the University of Chicago business school he entered a program at the London School of Economics in the early 1970s. From there he went to work for the First National Bank of Chicago in London as an international commercial lending officer with a specialty in film and electronics.

After a stint in the film industry in Los Angeles - "I loved the entertainment industry but I hated the life" - Farrell went back to England. "I was working with an English film distribution company and we needed to pull off some complicated financing deals," he explains. "It got to the point where I wanted to get back to the States, but I didn't want to go back to Los Angeles, so one of the things I did was go to the BBC in 1981 and buy the American rights to a couple of their television programs." One of these programs was The Antiques Roadshow.

Antique Collectors' Club had meanwhile asked the BBC about the possibility of using Roadshow videotapes as a promotional tool. Britain's quasi-public broadcasting group in turn referred Antique Collectors' Club to Farrell. "These are some of the best books I've ever seen on the subject," Farrell thought as he leafed through an Antique Collectors' Club catalogue, not knowing that by 1990 he would be marshalling the publisher's Western flank.

The Antiques Roadshow got its start two decades ago when a BBC producer named Robin Drake went to a typical auction house appraisal day. "He saw all these people milling about with all manner of objects under their arms, having experts tell them what they had or didn't have, and what it might bring at auction," says Farrell.

Drake thought it was great theater, and so, apparently, did British viewers, who made the Roadshow an institution, both by watching it and by turning up in vast numbers when Roadshow appraisal days were announced. In Britain, the broadcast begins the first Sunday after Christmas and continues for about 15 weeks.

Despite the lingering skepticism of a few who fear that the Chubb's Antique Roadshow may be too offbeat for the American mainstream, Farrell is committed to his dream. "Part of Roadshow is about the objects that we invest with meaning in our lives. The other part is game show. Everyone's got the prize, they're just trying to figure what it's worth."

He continues, "It's the human element, not just the objects. What you always hope for is that you'll have an expert telling somebody who is quite surprised that what they've got is worth a lot of money." He reflects for a moment, then says, "Of course, one of the greatest Roadshow lines I remember is an appraiser saying, `Well, I'm sure somebody somewhere wants to pay a lot of money for this.'"

"It's been 15 years of workin' at it," Farrell says without a trace of fatigue. In this country, the BBC Roadshow has sporadically aired on cable television, first on Discovery, later on the Learning Channel. "It wasn't wonderfully successful in either place. They took about 50 episodes and cut them down to half-hour time slots. They ran them against the soaps in the daytime, Monday through Friday, and they didn't compete very well. But people who saw them, loved them. They were very disappointed when they were taken off the air."

Farrell's plans for an American Roadshow were meanwhile on hold. "I went to the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies about five years ago with this as a commercial project," he recalls. "At the time I was talking to a couple of cable operators. I said, `I feel this would be the perfect vehicle for you. Do you remember Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom? No one ever talked about that program as just Wild Kingdom.'" Chubb was reluctant to take on a commercial project but, as the underwriter of American Playhouse, was comfortable with PBS.

Farrell's break came two years ago in the form of a phone call from Maine Antique Digest's editor, Sam Pennington. "Sam said, `Hey, I just had a call from WGBH Boston. They are talking about doing a program. Sounds like your program. They're even calling it the Antiques Roadshow. I told them they better talk to you."

The publisher headed up to Boston to see Vice President of National Programming Peter McGee, who had first suggested looking into the Roadshow project, and Executive Producer Aida Moreno, a petite, vivacious woman who for the past 15 years has dazzled audiences with Championship Ballroom Dancing. Then it was back to Chubb in search of funding. Known as a fine arts insurer, Chubb agreed to substantially underwrite one season of Chubb's Antiques Road Show, with Moreno as executive producer and Peter B. Cook as co-producer. Farrell, who retains a financial interest in the project, has stayed on as consulting producer.

"In 1993, I was sent to England to take a look at The Antiques Roadshow. The mission was to Americanize it," confirms Moreno. "Basically, the essence will stay intact. There is an appraiser, someone comes to the door, a conversation ensues and a final price is given. What we will do, though, is through little roll ins give segments on how to take care of silver, how to get started collecting and so forth."

Over the past few months WGBH has been shaping up its location schedule and talking to possible hosts. The producer was looking for someone who could bring antiques and collectibles to life, just as Arthur Negus had in the United Kingdom. After auditioning a handful of dealers, curators and journalists in New York and Boston, WGBH decided on Chris Jussel, a debonair former dealer in English furniture, works of art and clocks who, until 1995, directed the century-old family firm, Vernay & Jussel. Jussel, who was instrumental in founding the International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show in 1989, had been an officer of the National Art & Antique Dealers Association of America between 1980-88.

"I got a call from Dan one day. He asked about various people as hosts � could I recommend them, what did I think, etc. We had a nice, long chat about it and then he asked me to consider it. I said, you're joking," recalls Jussel, whose first screen test was in New York on the opening day of the Winter Antiques Show.

Jussel, who will spend every weekend this summer introducing the show and its experts, has high hopes for its success. "It certainly will expose antiques to a wider audience. The educational aspect is what attracted me most, and working with educational television is very exciting. It will demystify the mysterious antiques business, but it will also be fun."

Chubb's Antiques Roadshow will be shot between June 1 and October 5 in Concord, Philadelphia, suburban Washington, Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque, suburban Detroit, San Antonio, Durham, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Greenwich and suburban Chicago. Given its notoriety as the setting for Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil, Savannah was also considered but rejected by the producers, who anticipate that the Olympics will absorb every cameraman from Houston to Chapel Hill.

In each location, experts will assume leading roles. "We've had tremendous support from the auction houses," acknowledges Farrell, whose initial conversations have been with Sotheby's, Christie's, William Doyle Galleries, Skinner and Butterfield & Butterfield. Roadshow's success will depend on involving the rest of the trade as well, and Farrell is soliciting help from smaller auction houses, dealers and curators nationwide.

The producers' biggest challenge, initially anyway, will be to attract large audiences to each appraisal day. "To have a great show, we'd like to get 2,000 to 3,000 people out. We want them to have a legitimate interest in finding out more about it and what it might be worth. It's not America's Funniest Home Videos - there's no mean spiritedness. We know that we will invariably run into people with fakes. It may be interesting from a television point of view to point that out, but this is not the Gong Show."

If Chubb's Antiques Roadshow is successful, well, who knows? Farrell, whose inclination to think concentrically is as evolved as a border collie's urge to corral sheep, is already imagining the books he will be selling to "people who always thought that antiques are something that other people do."

Fortunately, Antique Collectors' Club has books to sell. It is has steadily taken on distribution for other publishers, and now markets titles for Colonial Williamsburg; Sotheby's; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Peabody Essex Museum; Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts; and several high-tone English and Continental imprints. "I am very interested in talking to museums," Farrell confirms. "We put a book into a very happy context."

He notes, "Once we discovered that it was indeed a way to have more product in the truck to sell, then, yeah, we went after distribution aggressively. What probably made the most difference to us was Miller's Publications." Miller's International Antique Price Guide is Britain's answer to the ubiquitous Kovels', with a bit of the up-market, now out-of-print Knopf Collectors' Guides mixed in. "Sales of Miller's have been growing enormously. If we break them down by publisher, Antique Collectors' Club is still our biggest line, next is Miller's."

Though the arch-Anglo Dictionary of Blue and White Printed Pottery 1780-1880, volumes one and two, and Wedgwood-The New Illustrated Dictionary are perennial bestsellers, several successful Antique Collectors' Club titles are by Yanks. Carl L. Crossman's second, extensively updated version of The Decorative Arts of The China Trade is already out of print (ACC plans to reissue it later this year); Dog Painting, 1840-1940: A Social History of The Dog in Art by New York dealer William Secord was clamorously received; and Jewelry in America: 1600-1900 by Martha Gandy Fales is a title Farrell cannot keep in stock. Looking to produce more books of predominately American interest, Antique Collectors' Club has under contract a study of T.G. Hawkes by Corning Museum of Glass curator Jane Shadel Spillman.

"Sales of anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 copies are usually a pretty good result for us," says Farrell, whose employer benefits from owning its own presses. "We can take a book that has gone out of stock and put the plates back on, so we can go with shorter print runs." In fact, Antique Collectors' Club's initial success was with reprints of such classics as Ralph Edwards' Dictionary of English Furniture, originally a Country Life book, and A History of English Brickwork by Nathaniel Lloyd.

Besides acting as a wholesale source for booksellers, Antique Collectors' Club is developing its direct market capabilities through a Web site and a retail book catalogue, Art Book Services. The later is mailed twice a year to 20,000 specialists. In February, an additional 3,000 catalogues were posted to Northeast Auction's customers. "Art Book Services was initially a defensive maneuver," admits Farrell, who notes that mail-order has become a costly, if essential, part of his overall marketing mix.

"We've proved that, if you are going to make that commitment, you need to reach a critical mass," says the general manager, who is today welcomed by the same chain-store buyers who four years ago were too busy to see him. Achieving critical mass is, in fact, the unifying theme of his career, which on paper may appear scattered but in fact has been staked on the steady acquisition of strategic points on a map whose boundaries are broader than most of us are imaginative enough to see.

Now it is time to connect the dots. Farrell - a bicoastal, transatlantic, Hollywood-meets-High Street figure who has steadily sought to link public and private, high art and mass entertainment, Britain and the States - is poised to do it.