I wondered what might happen when the brilliant artisans of BBC One’s The Repair Shop were confronted with a slightly weary but classic piece of mid-20th-century British craftsmanship, foxed round the edges, slightly stooped, the hands strangely bloated, and the head desperately clinging onto the few strands of the hair still remaining. Yet this unique national treasure, with all of his famous provenance, finds himself in good care. Yes, His Majesty King Charles III, now approaching his 74th year and never seriously refurbished despite some rough treatment, is handled with chummy deference by the programme’s stars, presenter Jay Blades, ceramics expert Kirsten Ramsay, horologist Steve Fletcher, and furniture restorer Will Kirk. And equal solicitude is applied, to the obvious delight of the then Prince of Wales, to the bric-a-brac he’s asked them to do up.
So, presumably on the understanding it is all done free of charge, as tends to be the way with the House of Windsor, Ramsay sets about fixing a broken Victorian pot, and Fletcher takes apart an antique clock that’s been bodged to uselessness over many centuries. As you’d expect from the Repair Shop team, they do a superb job, and you do share that mix of reverence and trepidation as they approach an elderly but magnificent object (that’s the pot and the clock, not the monarch). Ramsay adds some fresh glaze and restores the inscriptions on the Queen Victoria diamond jubilee goblet as if she’s back in the potteries in 1897, and Fletcher makes Charles’s old-timer chime again. Apparently he finds the tick-tick comforting. Isn’t that nice?
