There is a popular show on the BBC here called The Repair Shop.
It started in 2017 as a daytime show but got reasonable reviews and a big audience, so is now sometimes to be found as evening viewing, as well as the inevitable repeats on cable tv.
The idea is very simple: a member of the public, let’s call them “the customer”, brings a broken item with some personal significance to the barn, an expert repairs it and the item is returned to the customer.
Items can be pretty much anything, from musical instruments, furniture, pottery, art, electronic equipment, teddies, silver items… the list goes on. Occasionally, more than one expert has to be involved in a job. For example, repairing a wooden chair may need the services of a woodworker and an upholsterer.
The customer does not pay for the work to be done. That’s covered by the show.
Some aspects of the work are rather skipped over. Time frames for example. It is never clear just how much time passes between the item coming in and the work being finished. This could be different for each item, of course, but it would be great to know how many hours of work goes into something.
Some of the experts have become personalities and moved into other shows, or appear on daytime quizzes or chat shows.
We watched the show at the start, then gave up for reasons which will be explained later. Knowing that we wanted to write about it now, we looked at some current shows and some oldies, to see how it has changed.