So far this year, my wife and I have done it every Sunday night.
It lasts about an hour, there’s a lot of intense, hands-on action, often a few tears, and when things get really hot, bits can suddenly snap right off.
It’s into its fourth season now, so it can’t be just the two of us who are avid viewers of The Great Pottery Throw Down. If you’ve NOT seen it, it’s basically, and admittedly with a sense of diminishing returns, yet another answer (after “what about sewing?”) to the question, “What else can we do with the Great British Bake Off format?”
I don’t have the actual stat’s to hand, but I’d guess the UK has more home bakers than it does home potters; which probably explain why, whereas new seasons of Bake Off are hyped up weeks in advance, the fourth batch of potters slipped quietly onto our January screens with barely a mention.
Mind you, and at the risk of sounding like an Adam Ant song, I don’t bake, don’t sew, don’t pot – but what I do do, is I enjoy watching the Bake Off, the Sewing Bee and (to bring us back to where we started) the Pottery Throw Down.
There aren’t many things Mrs C and I watch together, due to our wildly differing tastes. She likes things that are too scary and too sweary for me; and I like things that have too many cute robots in them for her – but the Baking ‘n’ Sewing ‘n’ Pottery competitions are one show (erm, three shows) that we both enjoy.
The things they come up with are often impressive, and for Mrs C the Sewing Bee has an additional frisson in that she regularly drools over arty tracking shots of upmarket sewing machines. But, you know, I don’t think the main draw of these shows is seeing a scale model of the Eiffel tower made entirely out of three different sorts of éclair/an old duvet cover/twenty kilos of terracotta. The real appeal is the people themselves.
I was going to say contestants, which of course they are, but that doesn’t seem quite the right word. We very quickly get to know them, and as each series rolls on, and the numbers dwindle, we genuinely care. So when, for example, this year’s first ‘potter of the week’ was chosen she was visibly moved. Evidently she knew her stuff, and without wishing to be rude she looked old enough that she may have been ‘at it’ for thirty plus years – but still, this was probably the first time a professional had said, point blank, you’ve done something really impressive there.
Just as Bake Off has its Hollywood Handshake, so there’s an unofficial badge of honour in the pottery too. Here it’s judge Keith Brymer Jones, who is regularly moved to tears by what he sees. Not in a “what the hell have you done with that lovely clay, get your hands off my kiln” sort of way – but by his almost tangible passion for ceramics, combined with suddenly seeing something unexpected. Sometimes it’s a clearly outstanding piece of work, but just as often it’s somebody’s wholehearted commitment to trying something new or ambitious, and with neither shame or embarrassment he’s in tears, the ‘trickle down’ effect meaning that it moves the contestant too (and on occasion even this stone-hearted audience).
Bake Off (without which…) can be a life-changing experience for the winner, or at the very least an experience that comes with a book deal and a TV slot. There isn’t the same sort of ‘knock-on effect’ for the home potters, unless TV nostalgia becomes so potent that they bring back the Interlude, so these people really are just doing it for the love.
Whether it’s a better show for that, it’s hard to say, but I do feel a bit sorry for it tucked away at the ass end of the weekend schedule. All these shows have something to recommend them, and Bake Off and Sewing Bee and Pottery Throw Down have all done very well.
But, of course, there can one be one winner. And that winner is…
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 