Why I’d rather watch a potter than a painter

The Great Pottery Throw Down BBC Two, Thursday

n the late Eighties, British Telecom ran a series of funny, affectionate advertisements starring Maureen Lipman as “Beattie”, a Jewish grandmother. The best of the lot featured her grandson, Anthony, who telephoned to confess his disastrous O-level results. He had, however, passed pottery.

“Pottery? Very useful,” exclaimed Beattie, proudly placing an academic scroll made of marzipan back on the celebration cake. “Anthony, people will always need plates.”

The advertisement encapsulates the snobbery towards practical subjects that I remember from my own school days, but three decades later, it would appear that Beattie is having the last laugh.

What’s the point in poring over books, when using your hands can prove far more lucrative?

Iwhich concluded last week, may be a light-hearted competition for hobbyists rather than professionals, yet the act of making coils with an extruder or throwing pots in reverse à la Japonaise is treated with a commendable seriousness.

The series has improved greatly since its launch in 2015, when it appeared to be a sad imitation of The Great British Bake Off.

Sara Cox’s squawking, earthenwareinspired innuendo – “I like your jugs!” – didn’t help matters but she has settled into her role and now exudes a homespun warmth that fits nicely with the muted browns of the Middleport Pottery where the show is filmed.

Keith Brymer Jones and Kate Malone were not from the same mould as your usual talent show judges. They offered gentle encouragement and dispensed advice as if talking to fellow professionals: “Rib off the throwing lines, sponge out the middle and wire it off.”

Indeed, Jones was the show’s secret weapon, a bear of a man who grows tearful when presented with glazes of exquisite beauty. As he handled contestant Clover’s tiny china panda, I was reminded of that passage in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men ( Of Meissen Men?) when gentle giant Lennie picks up a puppy to stroke it. Luckily, Brymer Jones knew his own strength. In the end, it was Ryan, a male model with directional hair, who triumphed.

His technical prowess made this the sensible choice, although my heart told me that Clover, who had grown up in a small village in southern China and whose parents sent a deeply touching good luck message via Skype, should win. But then The Great Pottery Throw Down is not a show that tries to manipulate viewers’ emotions. As television chef Keith Floyd used to tell his cameraman: it’s the pot that counts.

If pottery is a surprisingly telegenic pastime, painting, surprisingly, isn’t. which also concluded last week, fought hard to capture the efforts of its amateur artists. But the process of painting is so painstaking that witnessing a work evolve is like, well, watching paint dry.

The makers of The Big Painting Challenge were smart enough to realise this and so chose to focus on the psychological vacillations of the contestants. At least three of the four finalists seemed to be afflicted by self-doubt, and that helped events build to a satisfying crescendo. Their concluding task was to emulate Canaletto’s A View of Greenwich from the River, completed in the mid-18th century and inspired by a vista that, incredibly, has remained more or less unchanged for 250 years.

This was not a relaxing lesson in landscape painting. The four finalists were anchored on an exposed, tidal part of the Thames, which added considerable tension as a cruel, harsh wind battered their easels. One problem with the format is that there are simply too many people involved: two presenters, two mentors and three judges. This means that critical advice and opinions often merge, with no expert voice discrete enough to make any real impact. Should the

Keith Brymer Jones was the show’s secret weapon, a man who cries at pretty glazes