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?
The show is edited with just the right blend of music and inconsequential chat, and is as beautifully filmed as ever. This time it is partly based at the former prince’s latest home (of many) in Ayrshire, Dumfries House, a fine Adams’ Palladian mansion containing about 59 pieces of proper Chippendale furniture. It was bought by Charles for £43m about 15 years ago, and his charities and their apprentices have been restoring it ever since. The Repair Shop: A Royal Visit is basically an advert for the work the monarch, as Prince of Wales, did and does to train young people in everything from blacksmithing and thatching to plastering, catering and carpentry. All are still in great demand and help people otherwise underemployed make their way in the world and acquire the self-esteem that goes with craftsmanship.
Charles filmed this episode before he ascended to the throne, and thus had to zip it a bit, so we hear him bewailing the dire state of technical and vocational education in British schools. The sad thing is that that’s not such a controversial remark anyway.
The monarch is well used to the TV cameras, one way and another – he and Camilla even turned up in a slightly awkward episode of EastEnders for the platty joobs last year. He’s a fairly natural performer, and by now his various ticks – pulling at his cufflinks, hand in and out of jacket pocket, continually pointing at things – have a kind of reassuring quality. He’s even game enough to let Blades nudge him playfully as they josh one another about the size of their barns, like a couple of schoolboys. There’s no sign of that regal impatience we’ve witnessed recently. Maybe on his next trip to the Repair Shop the King will bring some of those malfunctioning fountain pens that seem to plague him.
Old stuff can mean so much to us, and yet we rarely think to look after it or to fix things rather than chuck them out. The most moving sequences in the film are when one of the Dumfries locals, Nicola, brings in a sorry-looking brass fireside set in the shape of a soldier, from about the 1920s, that belonged to her late husband Ewan. It had stood guard on the hearth of the home he lovingly renovated by hand. The team weld the soldier back together, make him nice and shiny, and it brings a tear to everyone’s eye when the little fellow is returned to Nicola for future safe custody, to be passed down the generations. Rather like the hereditary monarchy and indeed the century-old BBC, it’s an heirloom worth cherishing.
