The potter who made Britain cry with him
Peter Stanford finds out what’s behind the tears of TV’s favourite ‘weeping man’ Keith Brymer Jones
K‘That kind of harsh, judgmental approach – the Alan Sugar way – I can’t stand that. It’s carcrash TV’
eith Brymer Jones is welling up. To the three million-plus fans who have been tuning in each Sunday to Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throw Down, this will come as no surprise for, as one of the show’s judges over all five series since 2015, he is well known for, in his own words, “getting emotional”.
Or, as a group of scaffolders put it the other day, as he walked past their building site: “Well done, mate. You’re the man who cries on the telly.”
As we talk, the 57-year-old is sitting in his Whitstable studio, on the Kent coast, which is housed in an old bakery. His partner, actor Marj Hogarth (he has a 19-year-old son, Ned, from a former marriage), is in the background and wanders into the conversation at one point. She is clearly so used to his crying that she doesn’t even seem to notice.
What has set him off this time is recalling what has been, for many viewers, the highlight of the current series, which ends tonight. In episode eight, one of the finalists, Christine Cherry, an under-confident art youth worker from Preston, made a sculpted version of herself after she had undergone a mastectomy some two decades ago.
“I’d argue,” says Brymer Jones, “that it is the best thing I’ve ever seen on any series.” And then the tears begin. “The honesty, the bravery and the technical ability to produce it.”
Brymer Jones’s father never wept at all, he says, but a 2016 survey reported that attitudes are shifting a little, and four in 10 men now cry in public at least once a year. By that measure I calculate that he uses up half his annual allocation in the course of our interview. So what lies behind his willingness to blub?
“Clay can be hard,” he explains from experience, having spent almost four decades as a commercial potter, working for high street names such as Habitat, Heal’s and Marks and Spencer (“I am a 40-year overnight success story,” he quips).
“It’s a tough and draining process. I can’t help but get emotional.”
But this, he stresses, isn’t a gimmick that he has dreamt up as his TV trademark, like the Paul Hollywood signature handshake on The Great British Bake Off. It is something that started long ago, when he was 27.
“Without wanting to sound too flouncy, it began after my mother died suddenly. It was delving into my subconscious in therapy and bereavement counselling afterwards that made me more empathic. It means I can identify with the potters. They are putting their eir heart and soul on the line. I really respect spect that.”
It isn’t only Brymer Jones’s overactive tear ducts ts that has made Pottery Throw Down such uch compulsive viewing – though his big, ig, gentle face, framed by close- e-cropped hair,
6ft stature and broad shoulders (“I look ook like a bouncer”) has become its most familiar ar feature, and for r many its most reassuring. uring.
He is the one e who survived the series eries switching to More 4 after BBC 2 cancelled it in 2018, and its subsequent uent upgrade (on account of its growing audience) nce) to Channel 4.
Yet he confesses that he doubted it would work when he was first recruited. “I worried it would be like watching paint dry,” he admits. The 24 hours – or three days in the case of the ceramic urinals of episode nine – necessary for the potters’ creations to be fired sets a slow tone to the whole show.
It is, as one avid fan put it to me, “the most beautiful, soothing TV that has ever been shown”.
“It does have a very calming effect,” he agrees. “It’s gentle and people really get invested in the process.” Covid, a cost of living crisis and now the war in Ukraine has, he adds, meant we need a reminder that the world can be benign. That, for him, makes it a necessary antidote to the likes of The Apprentice
– reality shows that are focused on humiliation. “That kind of harsh, judgmental approach – the Alan Sugar way,” he laments, “I can’t ca stand that. It’s car-crash TV.”
If Grayson Perry can c be credited with bringing the public’s p attention to the potential of pottery as a vessel for exploring ex our emotions, the more nurturing nurturin approach to TV challenges challeng on Pottery Throw Down D was, of course, pioneered by Bake Off (the two are made by b the same company, compan Love Productions). Producti Yet while Brymer Jones Jo acknowledges acknowled the debt, he feels that clay c has an edge over cake in i revealing the human soul. sou “Withou Without sounding like a hippy nightmare, ni clay is grounding. groundin It’s about the earth, it’s about this organic material that has been with us since the world was created. And it is very sensual.”
For the potters themselves, he describes it as “an ongoing therapy session. That transfer from their feelings into what they are making is what makes me so emotional.”
Growing up in a middle-class home in Finchley, north London, he was shy, skinny and struggled in lessons because he is dyslexic – things which made him a target for school bullies. It was only when a kindly art teacher, Mr Mortman, gave him some clay and he made an owl, he recalls, that “all the anxiety washed away”.
No matter that the bullies later put a razor blade in his clay – he had found his calling, and had the support of his parents. His dad, stuck in a job he didn’t enjoy, told his boy to follow his dream.
“So I went to see the school careers officer, and she asked me, ‘gas board, British Telecom or police academy?’” When he told her he wanted to be a potter, she dismissed him: “You’re on your own there.”
Showing a resilience that he wears lightly, Brymer Jones refused to be crushed and – alongside enthusiastically joining the New Romantic music scene, as the lead singer of a punk band called The Wigs – got himself a good old-fashioned apprenticeship with a firm in Watford, working his way up.
“There is no one path in life,” he reflects. “University is one way but there are a myriad of others. I was always a square peg in a round hole.”
That ethos is carried through into the Pottery Throw Down, with its welcome-everyone and judge-no-one vibe (this year’s final includes a non-binary potter and a trans kiln technician), it has become a symbol of something kinder than what is going on in the rest of the world.
“The whole thing is like a parable,” he reflects. “We give the 12 potters the same task and they all come up with something different. That’s life isn’t it? It’s as eclectic as one’s individual imagination.”
‘The Great Pottery Throw Down’ is on Channel 4 at 7.45pm on Sunday