Put shedding in the Olympics and I guarantee a British gold

Shed of the Year Final Channel 4, Friday Secrets of a Police Marksman Channel 4, Thursday Skies Above Britain BBC Two, Wednesday

In a Venn diagram, shedders overlap with hoarders, hermits and home brewers

Where were you for Britain’s finest sporting achievement? Even now I can’t get it out of my head – the heartache, the clash of characters, the months of work all leading up to that single spellbinding moment. And then the sheer joy on the faces, the redemption, the triumph…

Yes, the Shed of the Year competition was sport at its best. There was none of the bewildering complexities of so many niche Olympic pursuits. Instead the rules of Shed of the Year were clear: best shed wins.

Yet the joy of this contest is only partly to do with the entries. Yes, a revolving shed teleported back from the future or a wattle-and-daub marvel that looks like someone dumped an upturned dinghy on a craft stall are very impressive. But it’s the folk of whom there’s now’t so queer that make the whole thing so watchable.

Take Brian. Last year he made a miniature Tudorbethan mansion; this year he powered back with something out of Hansel and Gretel made solely with the Tudorbethan offcuts. The purpose of Brian’s 2016 shed is to act as a workshop for him to handcarve his next project – a Gypsy wagon that doubtless will appear in next year’s Shed of the Year. “Brian, you are bonkers,” said presenter Max McMurdo. “Good to see you.” My sentiments entirely.

It would be nice to be able to say that all human life is here, but it isn’t. Instead shedders appear to consist of a very small subsection of human life, whose Venn diagram overlaps with hoarders, hermits and home brewers.

I say this with all due respect: in spite of their desire to build what are essentially elaborate cocoons and cut themselves off from the civilised world, the sheddies are an amicable bunch with a verve for recycling that would make the Wombles proud.

Just as you wouldn’t have thought that you could get addicted to rhythmic gymnastics on television, or find yourself fascinated by the keirin or trap shooting, it turns out that there is an Olympian spirit in the wonkiest garden lean-to if you know where to find it. Let me be the first to say that if golf can be an Olympic sport then shedding should be too. I suspect Team GB would be worldbeaters.

There is an argument that, given the ongoing security situation, the secrets and identity of a police marksman might be best kept secret. But that didn’t seem to bother Tony Long, whose life story formed the bulk of new Channel 4 documentary Secrets

of a Police Marksman. ( That said, Long admitted he’d had panic buttons installed in his home after he was named, in 1987, as the man who’d shot and killed two armed robbers and started receiving death threats.)

Given that the police are currently training up 1,500 new firearms officers, it was certainly timely to be reminded that, until relatively recently, we had none at all. Long had been there near the very beginning, joining in 1983, and he appears to have had an uncanny knack of being involved in almost every firearms incident that’s made headlines in the past three decades, from the Northolt siege in 1985 to the tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. His portrait of the early days in which officers with bottle perms and four days’ training wielded snub-nosed pistols was like Life on Mars. His descriptions of firearms work was more like Line of Duty: “If you’re the police officer who fires that shot, you will have to justify it.”

We got to spend a lot of time with Tony, or “The Equalizer” as the tabloids once christened him in honour of Edward Woodward’s TV vigilante who was popular at the time. I think the idea was that we might want to look deep into his eyes and see if there’s any difference between someone who’s killed someone and the rest of us. Eventually the producers asked the question outright: “How does it feel to shoot someone?” “It felt like training. It felt like being on a range,” said The Equalizer.

It is a mystery as deep as why people eat oysters or drive bright yellow cars, but sometimes several of the same type of programme come along at the same time. Skies Above Britain arrived on BBC Two no more than a couple of weeks after City in the Sky, and as the names suggest, they were much the same thing.

This time, however, there was a British focus, and this helped because it gave this first episode a purpose rather than just being a compendium of aeronautical factoids. This purpose was to ask what happens when someone violates our airspace, as the Russians do when they want to get a geopolitical rise out of us. So what happens is this: Air Traffic Control call the RAF who call the Prime Minister who ducks out of lunch to suggest we scramble a fighter or two to go and put the heebies up the errant scoundrel. What you might not have known is that the internationally accepted sign for “Geroff my airspace” is a Typhoon jet flying alongside the miscreant and “waggling its wings”. There was something peculiarly British about the wing waggle being Britain’s first line of defence. I suspect the wing waggle is generally accompanied by a couple of V-signs and a moony, but I don’t have the security clearance to check.

One man and his shed: Brian poses next to his latest Hansel-and- Gretel style creation