The marquee is in pieces. The bunting is boxed. The grounds of Welford Park in Berkshire – The Great British Bake Off’s bucolic nesting place – will never again be prowled by the four-footed innuendo-peacock that was Mel and Sue, or the nana of all Middle England, Mary Berry. Paul Hollywood notwithstanding, Bake Off as we know it – that calming, familiar presence on the BBC – is no more. It’s a time of national mourning. But there’s hope, because the next best thing is back.
The premise of The Great Pottery Throw Down is simple, because it’s lifted wholesale from its cakey forebear (both shows are made by Love Productions, also responsible for The Great British Sewing Bee). A group of amateur potters compete in a series of challenges, each an attempt to impress the show’s judges Kate Malone and Keith Brymer Jones. Each week, some contestants are sent home. Each week, Brymer Jones cries because he really likes a pot he’s just seen. And each week, something lovely happens which suggests that maybe, just maybe, humanity isn’t the swill-pit of hatred and solipsism it seems to be when watching any programme without the words “The Great ...” in the title.
Sara Cox returns to host this second series, which comes to you from the apparent pottery hotspot of Middleport, Stoke-on-Trent – all oom-pah music, cobbled streets and bare-brick buildings. It’s couldn’t be more Great and British if a squirrel with giant genitals arrived to cause a minor national outrage. As such, the whole thing feels warm and snug, like a lovely blanket that smells of home.
The contestants, too, are a reassuring Bake Off-by-proxy bunch, ranging from models to civil war re-enactors, businesspeople and cage fighters. All life is here – there’s even the obligatory bearded hipster with a man bun. They’re specifically selected to ensure maximum teary eyes by series’ end: pot-entials arrive armed with a charming backstory, and each strikes you as the sort of person who would definitely give you their last biscuit if you looked sad at work. As with Bake Off, you want all of them to win, and curse Tory Britain that they can’t.
The challenges whizz by much as you’d expect – failures, flattenings, triumphs – and Bake Off innuendo comes thick and fast, from harmless “just wiping the bottoms!” to the more Sid Jamesian “I liked her jugs tremendously”. What The Great Pottery Throw Down lacks in Mel and Sue it makes up for with copious graphic close-ups of hands moulding moist clay into shapes that would make a seasoned nurse blush. This is a show for all the family – but you’ll be the one having to explain to your kids exactly why half a cup of tea just spurted out of your nose.
The Great Pottery Throw Down’s main problem is, alas, pottery. You can’t get excited about eating a pot. Neither can you, at home, drool into your dressing gown over some exemplary detailing on the rim of a bowl. The beauty of Bake Off was that we all like cakes, and we could all nip into the kitchen and knock up a serviceable bun if pushed. Throw Down lacks this have-a-go inclusivity. Unless you have a pottery wheel and a kiln to hand, it’s an activity that feels ever-so-slightly distant.
Nevertheless, the reconstituted Bake Off, in its new home of Channel 4, will air later this year. We should probably give it a chance; Mary Berry wouldn’t want us to fall out. But here is another celebration of quaintly British mundanity – a reminder that these hobbyist pockets of interest exist, that the person sat next to you might be an amazing juggler, or accordion player, or anything. “During the day, I’m the mild-mannered person doing people’s mortgages,” says one contestant, Daniel, and you absolutely believe him. “In the evening, I’m The Mad Potter!”
Watching people create wonders out of nothing is any “Great” show’s magic, and this one has it in buckets.
• The Great Pottery Throw Down starts tonight on BBC2 at 8pm.
