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The Repair Shop: the hip younger brother to Antiques Roadshow

I realised while watching The Repair Shop (Wednesday, 8pm, BBC One; also weekdays, 4.30pm) that I hadn’t seen Antiques Roadshow for years. I should explain: The Repair Shop is the hip younger brother to Antiques Roadshow, in that Antiques Roadshow is passive (people bring things to be appraised, cooed over, then neatly packaged away), while The Repair Shop is active (people bring things to be appraised, cooed over, ripped apart entirely, then reupholstered).

My body has a violent Pavlovian response to the Antiques Roadshow theme tune. When I was a child, its opening strings heralded the end of the weekend as I knew it, and now when I hear that little trumpeting title tune my spine stiffens, my neck runs wild with goosebumps and my mind is plunged into inescapable Sunday Night Dread. So yeah, I don’t watch Antiques Roadshow any more.

The Repair Shop taps into a similar vibe, though: the quiet appreciation of old things; soft tittering; people with practical haircuts telling slightly-too-long stories about their mothers; Antiques People, with their violent shirts and two pairs of glasses round their neck on a cord; the middle classes sincerely describing things as “marvellous”. The premise of The Repair Shop – people bring significant old things from their family home to be fully repaired, telling a story about who bought it and how old it is and why it got so worn out and in need of repair in the first place, then leaving it for six weeks before coming back and crying at how good it now looks – shouldn’t, in any universe or along any timeline, be in any way entertaining at all. And yet.

Since learning the word “jeopardy” only a few years ago, I have always said it aloud to people when I am watching films, stating whether a film has either too much or too little jeopardy, according to a scoring structure that is constantly moving in my mind (sneaking out of a room without being seen, for example; jumping from one spaceship to another without a safety rope; a dead phone battery, meaning you cannot text to check you are invited to the end-of-high-school party). The exact inverse of this “jeopardy” is the less-appreciated “cosiness”, a quality tangible to a select few TV shows, but no less important. The Repair Shop absolutely drips with cosy. It is ripe with cosy. Cosy overfloweth. They rub cosy into old wood and it comes up in a lustrous new glow.

I could pretend The Repair Shop taps into something deeper – a polite tut in the face of our throwaway culture, a reminder of how Making Do And Mending still has a place in a world of online shopping and single-use plastic – but that’s not really the point. The point is it’s cosy. Never has a TV show so successfully synthesised such a particular sense of nostalgia: the feeling of lying sideways on your nan’s sofa (the one she doesn’t let anyone put her feet up on apart from you), grey rain tapping at the window, milky tea and biscuits on a plate on their way, two more hours and a round of meat paste sandwiches away from your dad picking you up and driving you, mouth-open asleep in the back of the car, all the way home. The fact that it manages to do all this with nothing more than “footage of someone quietly making a cog” is something akin to a miracle.