What a bright idea! Repairing a beefeater’s lamp for the Jubilee
ThERE are only two sorts of bloke: the ones who can tell you the provenance of each tool in their workshop, and the ones who can’t ever find the right screw or drill bit.
My grandfather was the first type. The hammers, pliers and chisels on the wall racks in his garage were old friends.
i’m the other type, frankly a disappointment to a family of DiY-ers, cursed to lose the charger for every snazzy cordless power tool i’ve ever bought.
steve, the metalworking craftsman of The Repair Shop (BBC1), is undoubtedly from the former set. holding up a small flat-head screwdriver with a yellow handle, he reminisced: ‘This is the first tool i ever bought in my life. i was round about eight or nine.’
That boggles me, not so much that he remembers getting it, more that he has gone a lifetime without accidentally leaving it in the loft or interring it under floorboards.
he was using it to fix the handle of a brass lantern brought in by beefeater Peter McGowran, chief yeoman warder at the Tower of London. Peter uses the candle lamp every night, setting off on his rounds at seven minutes to ten as he locks the gates.
‘it hasn’t been out of the Tower for 103 years,’ he warned, clearly reluctant to leave it in civilian hands. But the repairers worked their magic, correcting the wobble in the base and replacing cracked panes with hand-blown glass.
The brasswork gleamed when they handed it back. ‘i like things shiny but i’ve never seen anything as shiny as this,’ Peter marvelled.
he might want to stick his head around the door into the Crown Jewel house — he’ll find a few shiny baubles there.
This was a Jubilee special edition, nothing spectacular but still absorbing TV, with a royal link to every item. They included a pearly prince’s jacket in need of a few hundred buttons.
The most touching story came with a rusty tandem. John from somerset painted it red, white and blue for the Queen’s silver Jubilee and set off in 1977 with his wife Deb, who sadly died last year, to pedal to Paris.
Terrible rain meant they never got farther than Bayeux. But the French cheered them along the roads: they thought the bike celebrated the tricolour of their national flag. Now the tandem is restored, John and his sister-inlaw sally want to ride it from London to Brighton to raise money for cancer research, in Deb’s memory. Bonne chance, mes amis!
There were no Crown Jewels but a couple of national treasures on Hypothetical (Dave) with celebrity guests Jo Brand and Bill Bailey. They bickered amiably throughout, each contradicting everything the other said.
Bill declared himself an expert on animals; Jo told him he was an enthusiast at best. Bill guessed how Countdown’s susie Dent might answer a question about words; Jo overruled him.
When he was proved right, she marched off the set. it was gentle, unforced and very funny.
‘is there any way you two can do a podcast where you just disagree with each other?’ asked comedian Darren harriott.
hypothetical was an overengineered format when it launched. it still has too many artificial segments, and the running gag about presenter James Acaster’s feud with the props man is simply painful.
But Acaster and fellow host Josh Widdicombe have hit their stride now. The best moments are the impromptu ones, such as Jo’s retort when asked which of King Arthur’s knights she wanted to be: ‘sir Brandelot the Unpleasant.’