How OCD moulded me into a ceramics superstar
Great Pottery Throwdown judge Keith on the trauma that sparked mental disorder… but gave him the tools to become a TV success
KEITH Brymer Jones has become a fan favourite on The Great Pottery Throw Down, the competition for amateur potters currently in its fifth series on Channel 4. An expert ceramicist whose work is sold in 40 countries, Keith has also become known for bursting into tears at the sight of a particularly beautiful pot.
Bizarrely, he credits mental illness with helping him reach the pinnacle of his career.
Aged 11, he developed obsessive compulsive disorder, a condition in which sufferers have recurring unpleasant thoughts or feel the need to engage in repetitive behaviours they cannot control. Traumatic life events can contribute to the development of the condition.
“I developed OCD after a couple of traumas,” explains Keith, 57, friendly and frank when we meet over Zoom.
“I saw my grandfather fall down the stairs and land in a broken heap at the bottom. He was dead. I was so shocked, I ran shouting into the street. And that was in my first year of secondary school, which I hated.
“I was being bullied. I may look like a bricklayer now but I used to be a scrawny kid. That’s when the OCD really kicked in. It’s anxiety-driven. It’s about trying to control your life through order.”
An anxious young Keith would stay up every night at home in West Finchley, north London, rearranging the furniture in his bedroom, exhausted but unable to sleep until everything was “in order”.
“Everything used to have to be at 90 degrees to the bed,” explains Keith of his repetitive behaviour. “A pencil on a table, books, all the little trinkets I had as a child, they all had to be straight.
“I’d go to bed at nine and then I’d go, ‘Oh, that’s not quite straight’ and get out of bed and straighten it. Get back in bed. And then it would be, ‘The curtains are not quite straight’. Out of bed again. Until midnight.
“It was a nightmare. I became an avid door checker, checking them over again to make sure I’d locked them and I’d check my school bag for books over and over.
“When I was about 16, I got everything out of my bedroom. I literally had no furniture whatsoever, except for the bed, because that helped. I didn’t really know what was going on; I just knew that I was incredibly anxious.The OCD amplified when I was alone.”
Keith tried to hide the condition from his parents – his father found it annoying, he says – and from friends.
And bizarre as it may seem, Keith says that his OCD – which gives him a compulsive need for order and symmetry – helped him to become the hugely successful potter that he is.
“Pottery and its rules and processes, certainties and rituals, became a coping mechanism,” he says. “In potting, ‘production throwing’ is all about throwing the same thing again and again and again for a client. Every pot has got to be exactly precise, within millimetres.
“I got very good at that. People often say when I’m throwing 100 mugs, ‘They all look exactly the same!’ That’s where my OCD really comes to the fore. Because of my OCD, my designs revolved around the ideas of uniformity.
“I loved making multiples of the same thing, like sets of beakers or bowls.”
Luckily for Keith, the exhausting rituals of rearranging furniture and checking doors began to abate when he reached his later teens and discovered music and fashion. All that remained was the ability to throw
‘I saw my grandfather fall down stairs and land in a broken heap. I ran shouting into the street’
uniform pottery that clients loved, as well as a penchant for tidiness. “My girlfriends would notice how clean I kept my first car,” he says. “And when I was in a band, I always carried £500 in my wallet and that was something to do with OCD. It felt
like a kind of cushioning, a safety mechanism to cover every eventuality, but the need to have everything at right angles went away.”
But emotional turmoil engulfed Keith again in 1994 after his mother died and he began having panic attacks.
“Nothing had affected me like that before – I felt really helpless and hopeless,” he recalls. “I never thought something emotional could physically affect you.
‘The Throw Down director ran out and said, whatever you do, don’t stop crying. It’s brilliant’
Manifesting that in panic attacks was quite strange. So I went to counselling and that helped.”
He also had seven years of counselling in the early 2000s to cope with various issues including the breakdown of his marriage. Keith declines to name his ex-wife but he remains close to their son Ned, 19, and lives happily in Margate, Kent, with his partner of seven years Marj Hogarth, an actress.
The surprises about Keith keep coming. He may be a cuddly middle-aged man who judges a genteel pottery show on the telly, but Keith has a secret past – in his teens and early twenties he was a wild rocker.
As lead singer in post-punk band The Wigs he indulged in outrageous antics, jumping off the stage to flirt with audience members and even biting his fellow bandmates.
“I know, what an idiot,” he says. “What a decade. I’d do anything for a laugh but of course I wouldn’t do that these days.”
The Wigs were active from 1983-’91 and had modest success but during the day Keith was still working long hours as a potter.After his A-levels he spent five years learning his trade at Harefield Pottery in Hertfordshire before setting up on his own in 1990, renting a studio in Highgate, north London.
He worked ridiculous hours producing pottery for high-end shops including Heal’s, Conran, Habitat and Laura Ashley. After more than a decade, however, cheap imports made it no longer viable and Keith was burnt out. In 2008, he joined MAKE International as director and head of design.The firm now produces his pots and those of other top British designers. But his post-punk rocker days turned out not to be just a youthful fancy – in a roundabout way they landed him his career on TV. In 2013, business partner Dom Speelman convinced Keith to star in a daft marketing video, dressed as Adele, singing her 2011 hit Rolling in the Deep, promoting his crockery (it featured a lot of broken pots). “Within 10 days we got this production team together and filmed this video at Dom’s aunt’s mansion in Norfolk and it’s pretty good. And it kind of went viral. “Someone from Love Productions [who make Bake Off, Sewing Bee and Throw Down] rang me and said he’d seen the video and it was really funny and did I want to be a judge on the telly?
“What I love is it had nothing to do with my talent as a potter and everything to do with me in a dress, singing badly to an Adele song in a bloody mansion in the middle of nowhere. Isn’t that the wonder of life?”
KEITH immediately made a name for himself on The Great Pottery Throw Down, not just as an expert potter but as a judge who was regularly moved to tears when shown a lovely piece of work.
“I never know when it’s going to happen,” says Keith. “They’re being judged on making something that they are really proud of and I know how hard it is to be able to achieve that, to achieve what’s been in your imagination in a three-dimensional form, especially on a national television programme.
“For something that you love doing, that’s a great achievement, so I can’t help but really feel for them, in a good way. I’m welling up now just talking about it.”
The director on Throw Down realised that Keith’s crying was TV gold. “The first time, I remember the director running out of the monitor room, saying, ‘Whatever you do, please don’t stop crying. It’s brilliant’.”
But what Keith is proud of – and very surprised by – are the warm messages he’s received from viewers about his blubbing.
“This is the amazing thing,” says Keith. “I get so many messages from people that have been in the Army, for example, saying, ‘It’s fantastic what you do, in the way that you can show your emotion like that.’
“It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of strength. There’s this belief that men shouldn’t cry but it’s not correct. Better out than in, that’s what I’ve learned.” After all Keith has been through, he should know.
●●Boy In A China Shop by Keith Brymer Jones (Hodder, £20) is out now.
For free UK P&P on orders over £20, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or visit expressbookshop.com. The Great Pottery Throw Down continues on Sundays on Channel 4