Remarkable pottery talent shone through a tired format
Is there anything that cannot be made from clay? That seems to be the question that The Great Pottery Throwdown (Channel 4), whose seventh series ended last night, is trying to answer. For the final its three amateur ceramicists were asked to make a chandelier, of all things. It was a task so complicated it made you wonder where this ends: how about a porcelain octopus? How about an ocean-going liner with a filigree string quartet on the foredeck?
In any case, Dan, Dave and Donna, our three likeable finalists, didn’t bat an eyelid as their task was laid before them. They were in many ways contestants from central casting: Donna the Apollonian spirit incarnate, all planning and perfection, Dan the Dionysiac free-thinker and Dave – a Platonic form of “a Dave”, set stolidly between the two. Obviously, I was rooting for Dave because Donna (Potter of the Week five times) is a total swot and Dan wears the kind of ponchos that people used to bring back from gap years (and shouldn’t). You can rely on a Dave.
The fact that all three of them managed to not merely make a passable ceramic chandelier but make one that, in its decoration, relayed chapters of their life stories, was gob-smacking. I’m not sure what
Britain is supposed to be good at these days but we sure can pot (and I’d like to see AI make a clay chandelier).
But the programme itself stumbled in the middle section, when for its technical challenge it tried to catch out Dan, Dave and Donna with a series of multi-faceted bowls. Dan, you see, had just been carving out facets on his chandelier. He’d stolen a march on the producers, who hadn’t seen his facets coming. He duly took the technical prize.
As remarkable as the crafting feats on show here were, there is undoubtedly a sense that the Great British Cheerful Handiwork Television Experiment may be reaching the end of its natural life. Sewing, cakes, pottery and pretty much everything bar Morris Dancing have now been done, if not to death, then to cliché, which may be worse. You knew judge Keith Brymer Jones was going to cry because he always does and you knew that when Dan’s chandelier needed flipping over Dave would pop round and help because on Great British shows that’s what people do.
Inevitably, Donna won. But, in the end, everyone’s a winner in Great British Handicraft land, all finding out who they really are through the medium of cakes, bowls and crochet.
By the end of the first episode of the new series of Forensics: The Real CSI (BBC Two), I was in two minds. As the credits rolled the voiceover said, “If you want to find out about what it takes to work in forensic science, visit bbc.co.uk/realcsi”.
I mean, on the one hand, just try and stop me. I have watched enough CSI,
and several lifetimes of Silent Witness,
to know that what it takes to work in forensic science is to be able to rock a pair of disposable shoe coverings, smoulder gently in front of a toothsome colleague and leave little yellow signs by anything that piques your interest.
But on the other hand, Forensics,
a documentary series about what being a Gil Grissom or a Nikki Alexander is actually like in real life, was a salutary reminder that it is a) quite hard and b) quite gross.
This episode was entitled Body in a Freezer and that pretty much said it all. There was a body in a freezer in the recent drama Bad Sisters, and a couple of other sub-zero cadavers in some early episodes of Luther, but none of them looked like this one. Which is to say so decomposed and mushed up that the real CSI couldn’t show it without some heavy pixelation.
The freezer had turned up at a dump and the discovery of what was inside set off a forensics trail that, eventually, led to a prison sentence for the poor dead man’s carer. He’d loved him like a dad when he was alive, so he said… but once his surrogate dad died, his carer stuffed him in a freezer (that turned out to have been bought for the purpose) and left him there, so that he could continue to live in his flat and access his bank account.
As such there was a 24 Hours in Police Custody part of the programme (“the real” Law & Order, if you like) that was riveting, as detectives closed in on what had happened to the corpse and who had done it. The actual forensics part, however, was less engaging. I suspect this is because forensics is, by definition, painstaking and slow. Of course, it’s churlish to criticise something for being precisely what it tells you it is going to be. Maybe that’s just a sign that on reflection, forensics isn’t for me.
The Great Pottery Throwdown ★★★ Forensics: The Real CSI ★★★