"This is the workshop of dreams!"
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars, #13
Greetings, friends of now and friends yet to be!
I’m going to now wax poetic about a teevee show.
In spring of 2021, The Wife underwent a routine medical procedure that carried with it a mandated six weeks or so of bed rest. As many have discovered, streaming video made that period a lot more bearable, and we watched and discovered quite a few shows during that time. One was a show I found on Netflix—just a single season’s worth—with an intriguing title: The Repair Shop. I looked up the description, found it intriguing, and gave it a try.
We then plowed through the one and only one season that was available on Netflix at the time, and then…well, we’ve watched a lot of The Repair Shop since, using a method of access that rhymes with “Florence”. (Seriously, this whole “streaming everything” future we’ve arrived in would be a lot nicer if finding the specific things we’d like to stream wasn’t often simply impossible.)
The Repair Shop is something of a twist on the Antiques Roadshow model. People bring their very old items that have been sitting in their closets for many years, that’s true—but that’s also where the resemblance ends, because the focus on The Repair Shop is not appraisal but restoration and repair. The show is mainly filmed in one of the large barns on the grounds of the Weald and Downland Living Museum in West Sussex, UK:
The barn is a gorgeous setting: huge and airy, high-ceilinged with a thatched roof and warm wood walls, with bright light inside; the interior (for the purposes of the show) has artisans set up at workstations along the walls, while the central area is the main display area where items are presented when they are brought in and then displayed again when they are being sent home. And what are the items?
They might be anything at all, and often they are. The items are things that belonged to loved ones often long gone, things that were neglected for years or even decades but which carry treasured memories of those loved ones from the past. It might be a clock that a grandfather brought back from the war but which hasn’t run or chimed since 1952, or a plush doll gifted to someone now in their 60s as a child which is now threadbare to the point of nearly falling apart. People have brought in barrels that are no longer watertight, and beloved hobby-horses or yard toys that were specifically made by someone’s metal-working father—literally one-of-a-kind items that don’t exist anywhere else. People bring in old radios in hopes of hearing something like the songs they danced to with their departed beloved, or old musical instruments that Dad once played.
Once the item is brought in and the owner tells its story, the items are handed off to a specialist artisan whose skills are suited to repairing it. This might be Will Kirk, the resident woodworker. If it’s a clock or a toy with a wind-up mechanism, it might go to Steve Fletcher, the resident horologist (thanks to The Repair Shop for giving me that word for my vocabulary!). Items made of leather might go to Steve’s sister Suzie, who is a master saddler; metal restorations go to Dominic Chinea, while upholstery jobs wind up with Sonnaz Nooranvary. There is a team of women, Amanda Middleditch and Julie Tatchell, who restore dolls and plush toys; and three art conservators, Kirsten Ramsay, Lucia Scalisi, and Brenton West, work on ceramics, paintings, and silversmithing, respectively. There are other specialists who are brought in on a recurring basis for vintage electronics, musical instruments (stringed or wind), book-binding, and more. Overseeing all of this is Jay Blades, a master furniture restorer.
As the work begins, the artisan experts examine the item, walking the viewer through the damages and their concerns regarding the restoration and repair work they’re undertaking. As they work, we get to see their process, and this is always fascinating, if you have any DIY interest whatsoever. The work involved is often painstaking, requiring tremendous amounts of committed patience that can be mindboggling to consider. Kirsten, our ceramics expert, will often have to piece a work back together from a literal pile of shards, going one at a time; or Steve, the horologist, will literally have to straighten out each of the teeth from a clock’s movement.
The expert artisans always display a fine and understated approval of their own work that seems especially British; after getting a clock moving again, Steve might say to himself, “Brilliant! I’m quite happy with that,” but in a matter-of-fact way, not so much cheering himself on. Other times, though, when they solve a particularly thorny problem, they might get a bit more demonstrative:
Nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, is there? It’s good to know that you’ve done a good job and to acknowledge it.
What especially fascinates is the attention paid not just to the work but the nature of the work and the goal of each job. The pieces brought in aren’t just random items found in antique shops; these are personal items that carry specific, personal memories, so often the goal of the work isn’t to restore the items to their original pristine glory but to repair them to functionality while still honoring the wear and tear that represents the physical remainder of those specific memories. It’s the evidence of use that’s important: the way someone gripped this particular item, the way they wore this particular groove in it by the way they held it for years, and so on. It’s this attention to the specificity of the memories, the honoring of the role the items play in their owners’ lives, that makes this show such a special thing to watch.
When the jobs are done, the owners are summoned back to see their item anew. The unveiling moment is the payoff, and it’s almost always a happy moment as the owners are amazed to see what’s been done. Sometimes the unveiling is deeply emotional, though, and there are even times when it’s an outright tearjerker. (Ask any Repair Shop fan about the jukebox episode…what a heartbreaker that one was!) Mostly though the memories are happy ones and the items’ owners are thrilled to see the work done and their item renewed. (There are also times when the artisan experts are emotionally hit by what they’re doing, as well. Leather expert Suzie Fletcher, whose husband succumbed to cancer some years ago, was overcome once while working on a leather item that had belonged to another man who had also been taken by cancer. When she lifted a leather panel aside and found that the old owner, whom she had never met, had signed his work, she had a moment.)
The Repair Shop is beautifully shot, as well; the interiors glow with warmth and the exteriors are in a pastoral setting that somehow also speaks to the show’s theme of looking back toward yesteryear and the memories therein. I find The Repair Shop a balm in difficult times. It’s a reminder that it’s OK to hold onto the physical things that hold memories for us, the things that connect us to the past. I’ll close with a quote by series host Jay Blades, who among other things recently made great strides in overcoming dyslexia:
We have become part of the throwaway culture where if something's broken, throw it away, buy new. It's just easier, more convenient. You can press a button and you will receive it tomorrow. And that is damaging our planet. It's damaging our way of community.
If you can track down The Repair Shop, I strongly recommend it. (Just in case I was in any way unclear!)
(More recently an Australian version of the show, The Repair Shop: Australia, has premiered. As yet I have not watched it.)
That’s all for now. Keep well, All You Zombies!
-K.
I saw part of this, maybe one episode, and really enjoyed it. But as with many streaming networks, I tend to stray from one to another and often don't remember to return to them. There's another similar one on PBS called Craft. It's not so much about repairs as how things are crafted from start to finish. I really enjoyed the episode called Forge. I'll never look at a fork the same way again.