Host Mel’s made her bed

ANSWER me honestly: if I were to say to you: “There’s a new programme starting tonight called Britain’s Best Woodworker,” what would your immediate reaction be?

Might it be something along the lines of: “Oh, for pity’s sake, talk about scraping the barrel!”

The reason I ask is because there’s a new show starting tonight called HANDMADE: BRITAIN’S BEST WOODWORKER (C4, 8pm), hosted by the one out of Mel and Sue who isn’t Sue.And when I first heard this news myself, I must confess those are the words that came out of my mouth, or at least a pre-watershed version of them.

I say “confess” quite deliberately here because, yes, I do feel rather ashamed of my knee-jerk response. On reflection, why shouldn’t traditional craftsmanship of this kind be celebrated on television? Lord knows,TV devotes more than enough airtime to celebrating the vacuous, the vain and the depressingly inane. Indeed, sometimes it even celebrates all three of those on the same island. Sorry, I mean on the same “programme”. Freudian slip.

A workshop on the Glanusk Estate in SouthWales is where our nine contenders, with varying degrees of experience, gather for the start of the competition.

There to judge their efforts are architect Alex de Rijke and furniture-maker Helen Welch. Mel, of course, is there to keep it breezy, at least as much as one can in room full of lethal-looking power tools. And if she’s quietly thinking: “Hmm, I’m going to struggle to make this even half as much fun as Bake Off,” she does a good job of hiding it.

That said, I’m not convinced she’s the world’s greatest expert on the subject itself. “Natural, versatile, sustainable,” she declares. “Wood can be anything you want it to be.”

No, Mel, it can’t. It can’t be a cheesecake. It can’t be the new iPhone 13.

What it can occasionally be, I grant you, is a temporary cast-member on Hollyoaks, as AJ and Curtis Pritchard recently demonstrated.

But, OK, pedantry aside, I take her point. Given the tools, talent and time, some people can indeed work wonders with it, as we’re about to see.

To kick things off, our contestants are asked to build a bed, a task for which they’re given two days. “But not just any bed,” stresses Alex. “We want the bed of your dreams.”

It’s an odd way of putting it (have you ever actually dreamed OF a bed?) but they seem to get his drift. Someone goes and makes a bed like a boat. Someone else makes a bed like a pond.

One person even makes a bed that looks like a bed.

Yep, there’s always one who has to show off.