It takes precisely 12 minutes for tears to fall in this festive edition of BBC One’s The Repair Shop, a show that pulls on the heart strings all year round, but never more so than at Christmas. Mark Stuckey, the series’ resident radio and electronics expert, is the first to get choked up.
He has just met Jo Thomas, who arrives at the bauble-decked workshop with a broken record player housed in an intricately carved wooden box. It was the last Christmas gift she received from her son Ben before he died of cancer aged 10; she needs it to be fixed so that it can once again play Ben’s favourite Abba song (it was “Slipping Through My Fingers”, as if your heart wasn’t already broken) for her and the family. “It’s got me going,” Stuckey sniffles, his eyes welling up. Half the country will probably sob along with him.
