The most moving show on TV: why we should all be watching The Repair Shop

The world is a terrible, terrifying place to be. Trump, Brexit, the Amazon fires, microplastics, the shadow of recession; it can sometimes feel as if everything is conspiring against us at once. We’ve grown tired. We’ve become bad-tempered. We’ve burned out. What we need is a long, leisurely, comforting soak in a warm bath. We need to relax. We need to exhale.

By God, The Repair Shop is exactly the television show we all need right now.

The Repair Shop is a BBC series that has quietly bimbled around the schedules since 2017. Sometimes it has been on BBC Two, sometimes on BBC One; sometimes in the daytime, sometimes in the early evening; sometimes lasting 30 minutes, sometimes lasting 60. It is as though it hasn’t wanted to be seen, as if it is too polite to draw attention to itself.

As a result of this diffidence, people who stumble upon The Repair Shop do so of their own accord. When they find it, they treat it as if it is theirs. And this is very much in keeping with the show itself. The Repair Shop is a gorgeous ornament of a thing. It luxuriates in its own sleepy pace. It rewards patience and care, and it may very well be the most moving thing on British television.

If you’ve seen it, you’ll know. In a thatched barn kitted out with bare wood and fairy lights, a team of expert craftspeople is given a number of careworn items to repair. The items are usually very old, often one of a kind, and almost always hold enormous sentimental value for their owners. It might be a portrait of somebody’s mother, or a clock, a train set, a teddy bear or a teapot. The owners explain the family significance of these heirlooms, then the team set to work: cleaning, fixing, brightening, burnishing. There is no noise or fuss, just lots of quiet intent. When the repairs have been made, the objects are presented back to their owners.

And this is the real magic of The Repair Shop – the awestruck reaction of the owners. One recent episode, in which the team meticulously restored a 130-year-old tiger automaton by handcrafting new brass parts and slowly building up layer upon layer of papier-mache, broke me. It just broke me into pieces. A man had got it fixed for his elderly father, who had played with it as a child after being given it by his father, and the moment he saw his old toy revived – his eyes glowing with childlike wonder once more – absolutely destroyed me. And this isn’t particularly rare, either. It happens multiple times an episode. It is extraordinary.

What a show this is. When you watch it, you can’t help but think of all the thousands of worse versions it could have been. The Repair Shop could have gone the way of one of those terrible American cable shows about custom motorcycle garages, filling the barn with obnoxious “characters” and cack-handedly manufactured moments of faux-peril to keep people watching. It could have gone the way of Antiques Roadshow and undercut the sentimentality by placing a craven monetary value on all the items. It could have gone the way of any other daytime BBC show and become a cheap and cheerful competition, where David Dickinson eggs on a hapless member of the public to restore a Regency-era dresser with a plank of MDF in 45 minutes for a chance to win £50.

But it doesn’t. The Repair Shop gets everything right. It is slow and charming, and superficially low-stakes. It is quiet and free of confrontation. It is tonally close to the early years of The Great British Bake Off before it was ruined by ambition and repetition. The Repair Shop is the show we should all be watching. It is an exhalation.

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