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Phil Pascoe

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Reprinted from The Times 15/2 -


Put away those pots and pans and reach for the saws and planes, because woodwork is taking over from baking in the latest reality TV show.

Channel 4 is to present a carpentry competition this spring in Good with Wood, hosted by Mel Giedroyc, the presenter and comedian, and tapping into one the big winners of pandemic lockdowns.

“Woodwork has proven to be extremely popular in the past 12 months”, Chris O’Boyle, trading director for everyday repair and maintenance at Homebase, the DIY retailer, said. Its sales of wood clamps have risen by almost 68 per cent this year compared with a year ago, and sales of chisels, files and planers have jumped by 50 per cent. Robert Dyas, the hardware retailer, has recorded a rise of more than 300 per cent in sales of chisels over the same period.


According to Helen Welch, founder of the London School of Furniture Making: “Armed with no more than a penknife you can whittle a wooden butter knife. Whittled spoons can be made out of fallen branches or even bits of firewood.”
Sophie Yeo, 31, an environmental writer from Cardiff who recently started woodworking, said: “I got a whittling tool called a sloyd knife and watched YouTube videos to learn the basics. I found it very easy, almost like knitting.” She has carved mostly spoons, using wood from local forests.

Applications to the London School of Furniture Making’s core skills course rose by 30 per cent between June and Christmas.
“I’m not just seeing more demand for classes,” Welch said. “There’s YouTube videos on almost every woodworking technique and huge appetite for instruction books.”
Paul Sellers from Cheshire runs YouTube’s most subscribed UK woodworking channel. Each week he uploads tips for beginners. More than 100,000 people have watched one of his videos on how to make a small storage box. “I’m getting a million views a month,” he said. “I’ve had worries that my craft was dying. But my online popularity reassures me that there are lots of new people coming to woodworking.”
In the US, Steve Ramsey, from Chicago, has 1.6 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. “People are getting fed up with scrolling through Netflix,” he said. “Many of my followers have good jobs at tech companies, but what they’re missing is the satisfaction of building something with their hands. That’s why woodworking is so therapeutic.”



https://www.thetimes.co.uk/topic/television
 
It's great that more people are interested in woodwork, but these types of TV programmes are mainly human interest shows, with whatever the people are doing (cooking, makeovers etc) being secondary.
 
Reprinted from The Times 15/2 -


Put away those pots and pans and reach for the saws and planes, because woodwork is taking over from baking in the latest reality TV show.

Channel 4 is to present a carpentry competition this spring in Good with Wood, hosted by Mel Giedroyc, the presenter and comedian, and tapping into one the big winners of pandemic lockdowns.

“Woodwork has proven to be extremely popular in the past 12 months”, Chris O’Boyle, trading director for everyday repair and maintenance at Homebase, the DIY retailer, said. Its sales of wood clamps have risen by almost 68 per cent this year compared with a year ago, and sales of chisels, files and planers have jumped by 50 per cent. Robert Dyas, the hardware retailer, has recorded a rise of more than 300 per cent in sales of chisels over the same period.


According to Helen Welch, founder of the London School of Furniture Making: “Armed with no more than a penknife you can whittle a wooden butter knife. Whittled spoons can be made out of fallen branches or even bits of firewood.”
Sophie Yeo, 31, an environmental writer from Cardiff who recently started woodworking, said: “I got a whittling tool called a sloyd knife and watched YouTube videos to learn the basics. I found it very easy, almost like knitting.” She has carved mostly spoons, using wood from local forests.

Applications to the London School of Furniture Making’s core skills course rose by 30 per cent between June and Christmas.
“I’m not just seeing more demand for classes,” Welch said. “There’s YouTube videos on almost every woodworking technique and huge appetite for instruction books.”
Paul Sellers from Cheshire runs YouTube’s most subscribed UK woodworking channel. Each week he uploads tips for beginners. More than 100,000 people have watched one of his videos on how to make a small storage box. “I’m getting a million views a month,” he said. “I’ve had worries that my craft was dying. But my online popularity reassures me that there are lots of new people coming to woodworking.”
In the US, Steve Ramsey, from Chicago, has 1.6 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. “People are getting fed up with scrolling through Netflix,” he said. “Many of my followers have good jobs at tech companies, but what they’re missing is the satisfaction of building something with their hands. That’s why woodworking is so therapeutic.”



Television | The Times & The Sunday Times

Steve Ramsey is actually in Metro San Francisco, not Chicago . . . very entertaining and informative but I find the obsession with cats a bit annoying.
 
Destined to fail due to formulaic concept.

Everyone starts. Someone boats, people work through things various disasters, someone works up to the very limit of time with a "they'll never save this attempt" gimmick and then at the end of the show, they'll have a pro-wrestling pre-destined finish.

I started making chisels for fun, asking questions about forging (I don't watch much TV) and almost everyone said "FORGED IN FIRE!!". I watched the show, and the format is contrived to make sure that none of the makers is familiar with the tools and methods they used to create trouble.

Everyone looks incompetent, the jobs are made to seem impossibly hard and then when they send people back to their own shops, you see them working with tools they're familiar with and actually getting something nice made.
 
I essentially want to watch open university for woodworking, methodical explaination of skills and techniques, a project or two from start to finish. My expectation of 'Good With Wood' is about as much imparting of knowledge as CSI -Miami has given me skills to analyse DNA and blood splatter.
 
Steve Ramsey is actually in Metro San Francisco, not Chicago . . . very entertaining and informative but I find the obsession with cats a bit annoying.
I like a lot of Steve Ramsey but way too much work with Dado stacks for me.
 
Please no celebs, every time I put on the tv, they are there! Let it be the man on the street, who is interested in woodwork, not just the celebs who are interested in the money!
 

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