If they can fix Charles’s clock, how about our failing trains?
The Repair Shop: A Royal Visit
BBC1, Wednesday HHHHH The Love Box In
Your Living Room BBC2, Thursday HHHHH
Last week King Charles appeared in a special edition of The Repair Shop to celebrate the BBC’s 100th anniversary. What might he bring to the barn for fixing? I was hoping he’d bring Britain. ‘It’s been in my family for generations. My mother was so fond of it. We all have been, really. But one day I realised it simply wasn’t working any more. I turned it off and on again but that didn’t seem to help.’
Steve, the horologist fella, would take it apart, bit by bit, cleaning all the parts. Kirsten, the ceramics lady, would glue the cracks and carefully paint over them so you’d never know. Will (furniture) would buff it up with wax until it shone, and then Jay would do the big reveal, pull off the cloth and – ta-da! A Britain where prime ministers last more than six minutes and trains actually run!
We’d all marvel – ‘It looks like new!’ – and then cry because, aside from all else, you can never watch The Repair Shop and not cry: fact. That was my hope, but in the end it was a clock and a Wemyss goblet. Bit disappointing. Still, Jay and Steve and Kirsten and Will and the King all seemed to get along like a house on fire and he now has his own ‘HRH’ mug in the barn. So perhaps there’ll be a next time, and he’ll bring Britain then. Unless it suddenly fixes itself. I pray so, as I am meant to catch a train on Thursday.
First, Steve and Will and Kirsten and Jay travelled to King Charles’s estate in Dumfries, East Ayrshire. It’s from there that The Prince’s Foundation runs apprenticeship schemes in heritage skills that might otherwise die out. Blacksmithing, stone masonry, bricklaying, that kind of thing. The King was Prince Charles at the time of filming, and you could say he knows more about apprenticeships than most, having served a 70-year one.
He arrived rosy-cheeked and wearing shirt and tie, but the belt, my goodness. Multicoloured and braided. I didn’t see that coming. He and Jay met some of the apprentices – ‘With blacksmithing, I found my calling’ – and talked about crafts and keeping them going, which is a subject dear to both. I don’t think it would have worked as well had the King agreed to appear on MasterChef, say.
Meanwhile Steve, Kirsten and Will toured the 18th Century Palladian house filled with incredible objects. Will falls on a Chesterfield sofa, but not literally, as you’d probably be dispatched to the Tower for that. ‘Look at the amazing craftsmanship on these legs!’ he exclaimed. Now, get this: the house contains 59 other pieces of Chippendale, which amounts to ten per cent of the known quantity of Chippendale in the world. No John Lewis for our monarch.
But no one was let loose on any Chippendale. Instead, one heirloom was a broken 18th Century bracket clock. The King loves a clock – ‘The beating heart of the house’ – as did his grandmother. She would try to get them all to chime at once, which was a pain when eating dinner, as at some point they’d all go off, and, as he explained: ‘We couldn’t talk.’ Everyone laughed uproariously, perhaps because it was the King.
Then it was the Wemyss commemorative goblet celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It was a mess. Cracked, badly glued, stem broken off. ‘It fell off when someone was opening a window, apparently,’ said the King. ‘They never owned up.’ He could actually have bought a pristine one on eBay for £595, plus £12.95 for postage, unless he personally collected it from Lichfield. But I don’t know if he knew that.
The items were shipped to the barn, where Steve put on his six pairs of glasses, Will buffed and Kirsten went hell for leather with her epoxy. There was another story included, that of a woman who wanted a ‘fireside soldier’ mended in memory of her husband, so I got my cry in there. Eventually the King returned for the big reveal and he did seem genuinely thrilled and delighted. ‘I can’t thank you enough. So grateful to you. Bless you.’ It was all tremendously satisfying, and if there is a next time, perhaps the whole of Britain would be too much. Maybe just fix the trains?
Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield’s contribution to the centenary was The Love Box In Your Living Room, a mockumentary on the history of the BBC, which John Reith founded to teach working-class people to say ‘lavatory’ instead of ‘toilet’. It spoofed the style of documentary film-maker Adam Curtis, and perhaps got a bit bogged down in the BBC’s enemies, but otherwise it was wonderfully silly and it was all there: Blake’s 7, Jackanory, Play School, Play For Today, Dad’s Army, Peaky Blinders.
There were some excellent jokes: ‘At that time there was only one woman believed to be working at the BBC, Joan Bakewell, and they called her the thinking man’s crumpet. Val from Blue Peter was also a woman but they didn’t think of her as one, they thought of her as a normal person and left her alone.’ Eventually, ‘the BBC would have so many women you could count them on Moira Stuart’s hand’.
Lovely.