Blades and Jason are done up like a couple of kippers
David & Jay’s Touring Toolshed (BBC Two) is assembled from the loose parts of other shows. David is David Jason. Though famous for falling sideways through an open bar top, he also apparently is handy at fixing things so he has been sent out on the road with Jay Blades of The Repair Shop to… to do what exactly?
In this first episode they pitched their table at the Midlands Air Festival, where an addiction counsellor called Becky presented a wooden animatronic figurine that she’d made but which didn’t move as much as she’d like. In a jiffy the hosts had summoned from off-camera a master of animatronics who had a quick look and proposed a solution to put motors through a mechanical timer block.
“That’s what I was thinking,” quipped Jason, channelling Del Boy. “I was just testing him. You’re on the right track.” For that joke to work, which it just about did, you have to accept that Jason knows much less about mechanical things than the initial pitch proposes. If that’s so, what is he doing here?
The answer seems to be riffs such as these, or it would be if there were many. The cloth-capped joshing and mugging between the two hosts is all a bit make-do-and-mend. “This I’ve got to see!” said Jason as Blades proposed to fold his long limbs into a small Second World War helicopter. It’s not quite clear if Blades is Jason’s pliant straight man or simply his carer. They’re Lou and Andy from Little Britain but with feebler material. (On a warm-looking day, Jason was swaddled in a thick gilet puffer.)
They visited an air museum where a sprightly 94-year-old ex-serviceman fixes up old flying machines. He showed them a restored cockpit, where switches were randomly flicked and fat was vaguely chewed. Back at the festival two men called Darren showed off some reconstituted bits of an old plane they’d made earlier. So while some handymen and/or women need the show’s help, others don’t.
It all felt aimless, like unmapped improv. The titular toolshed itself is a red herring, part backdrop, part travelling billboard. Lacking The Repair Shop’s heart and the funny bones of Only Fools and Horses, this rickety vehicle is held together with string, glue and gorblimey glottal stops.
Arecent documentary on BBC Four explored the darker side of the fertility industry. Seeds of Deceit told of a Dutch doctor who furtively used his own sperm to impregnate clients. The strange twist was that his vast pool of unwitting progeny were grateful to have found one another. Born from the Same Stranger (ITV1) visits similar terrain, but without the added interest of massive criminality.
This is from the makers of Long Lost Family, with Davina Mccall supplying the voice-over, so the timbre is full-on empathy and careful respect of boundaries. In the first part (of four) two young people – both only children, and with the watchful blessing of their mothers – attempted to find out more about the donors who constitute half their biological identity.
Liam, a London-based Channel Islander, would craft Father’s Day cards for an imaginary dad. His soulful eyes had a searching look and soon brimmed over when he found out the barest bones of the anonymous man who sired him and, moreover, sounded just like him. “Varying moods, outgoing, enjoys debate, sociable,” wrote this unknown man about himself.
Sarah, who comes from Singapore and lives in Cardiff, only discovered after his death that the man she grew up thinking was her father in fact wasn’t. The clever – if borderline invasive – sleuthing she deployed to find her mother’s donor produced a name and an address but, frustratingly, not a positive reply to her beautifully phrased letter of introduction.
That Liam and Sarah got only so far denied the episode its resounding crescendo. But that felt true to an area that remains an ethical minefield. Before a change in legislation in 2005, donors had anonymity. Imagine the extra exposure of having to go through it all on television. (Why men do it, beyond the small emolument per pop, is a question for another programme.)
If it couldn’t provide fathers, the growth industry of online DNA matching at least offers up new siblings. Liam discovered a quartet of them, each with bumpy noses and hyper-mobility like him. Thanks, bio-dad. Also, from the evidence of their pub rendezvous, all were crap at darts. As for this touching test-tube version of Who Do You Think You Are?, its aim is more or less true.
David & Jay’s Touring Toolshed ★★ Born from the Same Stranger ★★★