Handmade: Slow TV —

Handmade is a series of three programmes from BBC Four that look at three master craftsmen and their processes. The key difference is that these programmes are slow. Very slow. As Director Ian Denyer explains: “The brief was brief: no words, no music, long, very long held shots I added my own restrictions – no shot less than ten seconds, and no movement of the camera.”

This makes for an unusual and absorbing hour and a half of TV. I find the pace, the craft, and the exclusive use of diegetic sound calming, cathartic and comforting. As someone who is something of a frustrated ‘maker’ I love watching people do what they’re good at. Seeing someone use a tool that they know so well that it’s a habit rather than a thought about action is thrilling and genuinely inspirational. (I get the same feeling of wanting to create things when I’m in Atlantis looking at sketchbooks and pens…)

Check all three out here.

The series blog is also worth a look for the voices of the craftspeople and an insight into how the series was made.

Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential

"Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that, the great cathedrals of europe where built by craftsmen, they're not designed by them. Practising your craft in expert fashion is noble, honourable and satisfying."

Mastercrafts: Green Wood Craft

Amazing and inspiring documentary about wood work- really makes you want to run away into a forest and do some bodging. They talk about how in the modern world we are too disconnected from all the material sourcing and making processes and that with creating your own tools and objects (from lathes to kitchen spatulas to decorative chairs) comes a real freedom. The stuff they make is ridiculously strong and durable and when one guy talks about how he's spent 60 hours crafting a chair you get a real idea of the value imbued in that object.

Taking this topic somewhere else: I feel that if more of the stuff and objects we owned were either made by us- or had some kind of time and value invested into them by us, then that would be good thing. Possessions with a narrative attached to them- 'I found this thing here' or 'I restored this' or 'I made this'- seem to be more special and used with a greater joy than some white goods cracked out from China or something. (I think most people have a few things like this- for myself it's the chair that I found in the street, the table I made, the bike my brother restored for me, and the cafetiere that I discovered down Deptford Market.)

I'd like to figure out ways of getting some of the essence of the show mentioned into my life in London. Suggestions very much welcomed.