Another emotional The Repair Shop

For a show that originally snuck onto the BBC2 schedules with relatively little fanfare five years ago, The Repair Show has quickly become a national institution.

Viewers were reminded of just how popular it is last year with a special episode that proved even King Charles III is a fan. (It was filmed while he was still Prince of Wales and aired after he came to the throne.)

He certainly made a big impression on the show’s presenter Jay Blades, who says: “Working with King Charles… I couldn’t believe that someone from a council estate and someone from a royal estate, we just got on like a house on fire.”

However, Blades is getting used to being embraced by the viewers as, during his appearance on Desert Island Discs, he revealed that being involved in the hit show has transformed his life.

He said: “The Repair Shop has fixed me because what it’s done is actually brought me into another family, that’s people in front and behind the camera, who have looked after me and understand my kind of, I’ll call them differences, and just accepted them.”

He believes that sense of belonging is part of what makes the show so special, adding: “It talks about stuff that we all want, which is community, people coming together, love, and then also just kindness. It’s like people just feel comfortable and just open up.”

We’ll get to see just how much the team’s work means to people in this episode, as ceramics expert Kirsten Ramsay repairs a precious clay keepsake of a baby’s footprints.

It belongs to husband-and-wife Emese and Luke, whose twin sons David and Joshua were born prematurely in February, 2020. David was later diagnosed with a rare heart condition and passed away when he was only five months old. In his final weeks, Emese and Luke made clay imprints of his footprints, but the material has now sadly begun to crack.

Meanwhile, Matt Nickels faces one of his biggest-ever challenges when Bekki brings in a wreck of shattered glass and mangled metal that was once an antique terrarium. It used to take pride of place in her grandparents’ home, and they even took it with them when they moved to Spain in the 1990s.

Following their deaths, it was couriered back to Britain, but Bekki was devastated to discover it had broken in transit. Can Matt work his magic and bring it back to life, even when the original structure seems beyond repair?

Art conservator Lucia Scalisi meets Rokeya and Patricia, who have brought in a painting of their family’s home in Bermuda, which Patricia’s father Edward commissioned in the 1950s. The work has badly faded – family dog Spot is in danger of disappearing all together – but Lucia hopes to restore it to its former vibrancy.

Meanwhile, horologist Steve Fletcher meets a mother and son whose thermometer has been in the family for 60 years and even survived a spell in the Arctic, but is now permanently stuck on 70 degrees Fahrenheit.