Category: Culture

The repair

The expert will say multiple times how difficult it is, how priviledged they are to be allowed to work on it, and so on.

At the start, they ask what the item is, how it got to such a state, what the customer wants and so on. They often remark that they are not sure what they will do to fix it. Very often they remark to the camera just how thrilled they have been to do something.

We’re never convinced of this, but understand it’s for the show. When the producers are choosing items, a good sob story will be highest priority, then an interesting object, then an assessment of the chance of success (after all, failure is not good tv) and the expert must be involved. They must know what is coming, to have the right tools and so on.

In a sixty minute show you may see five minutes of each actual repair. There may be four in an hour show. Vast amounts of time are given over to the sob stories, clips of other repairs not in that show, scenes of the countryside and of the experts having a chat or a cuppa. All very lovely, but filler.

The impression given by the show is that the expert does it themselves, in the barn. As we said before, there’s no indication of how long any job may take. It could easily be taken away, worked on and then brought back.

Someone remarked to us once that they believed at least some of the experts have assistants and off screen helpers. We don’t know if that’s true, but it doesn’t invalidate the repair. It’s just not usually mentioned in the show.

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.