Any hopes that one man may have had of cashing in on a stencil purportedly painted by the secretive street artist Banksy were dashed when he took it onto the Antiques Roadshow television program for valuation.

The unidentified man claimed to have removed the piece which looks like one of the artists trademark rats from a wall on the seafront in Brighton, southeast England, in the early 2000s.

It looked loose. Went over, pulled it off basically, a little bit of a tug, the man told one of the shows art experts, Rupert Maas , in a clip that aired on the BBC in the United Kingdom over the weekend.

I know what it is, the man added. It was around 2004, basically trying to get a valuation of it.