Episode 12 The Repair Shop

Welcome to The Repair Shop,

where cherished family heirlooms are brought back to life.

Anything can happen, this is the workshop of dreams.

Home to furniture restorer Jay Blades.

Nowadays things are not built to last,

so we've become part of this throwaway culture.

It's all about preserving and restoring.

We bring the old back to new.

Working alongside Jay will be some of the country's leading craftspeople.

I like making things with my hands.

I love to see how things work and I want to know how things work.

Whether it's a Rembrandt or somebody's family piece,

every painting deserves the same.

Each bringing their own unique set of skills...

You're about to witness some magic.

..they will resurrect...

revive...

Oh, yes!

..and rejuvenate...

treasured possessions

and irreplaceable pieces of family history...

Oh, my goodness me, it looks like it's new!

..bringing both the objects...

Oh!

Oh, wow!

..and the memories that they hold back to life.

Oh, thank you!

Today in The Repair Shop,

painting conservator Lucia Scalisi unwraps a surprise...

Ooh...

..that will test all her skills.

I say "ooh" for a couple of reasons.

One, because it's beautiful, and, two, because it's badly damaged.

And furniture restorer Will Kirk has to think outside the box

to solve a home-made riddle.

There's so many loose pieces and I'm just trying to work out what goes where.

It's pretty much like a jigsaw puzzle at the moment.

-How are we doing, are you all right?

-All right, thank you.

But first through The Repair Shop doors today,

Andrew Simpkins has a family heirloom which needs the prowess of

ceramicist Kirsten Ramsay.

-Wow.

-A teapot, a very big teapot.

-OK.

-But you'll notice something about the lid.

It's followed the female line, so it's gone from great-grandmother,

grandmother, mother, sister, daughter.

-Goodness.

-Sadly, our daughter died two months...

two...

..two months ago.

So it passes to our granddaughter.

Um...

I have to stop there.

We were going to go on a family canal holiday eight months ago,

but sadly Alice fell ill a week before then.

After a number of rounds of chemotherapy, it wasn't working,

so sadly she passed away two months ago.

Alice was 28.

What's that behind there? Oh, a tomato, look at that.

Lily will never truly know her mother in a personal sense.

But I thought that the teapot could act as a link.

I think what we've discovered in the last two months

is that family is increasingly incredibly important.

And the inanimate object of the teapot,

in all its treacly colour,

does take on an added significance.

Perhaps other people might find it quite Victorian and gaudy,

but I think it's of its time and place.

I quite like that. There's a sort of naivety to it, really,

-which I think is quite charming, actually.

-Absolutely.

On the teapot itself, there are some surface cracks,

which would be nice if some of those could be repaired.

Some of them I like, because they place them in time and space.

You know, it's 130-odd years old, but the main thing is,

on the lid it should have a tiny teapot on top, a finial, here,

-which acts as the handle.

-Thank you for bringing it in.

-Thank you.

-No, thank you.

-Thank you for sharing that.

-Thank you, Andrew.

-Thank you.

-Wow...

-It obviously means so much to him.

Losing his daughter and then passing it down to the granddaughter,

it's to keep that kind of family history going.

-Yeah.

-It's just so important with what we do here,

but this piece in particular just brings it all home.

Blimey, there is every pressure, because this is such a...

-Absolutely, I'm feeling it.

-Yeah, I'm feeling it as well.

-No, I am.

I think my first priority is to actually sort this

crack out here, that goes down the side, because at the moment...

You can hear that there.

It's extremely vulnerable.

If this were to be put down sort of rather hard on a table,

it could just sort of crack into two.

So the first thing I'm going to do is actually give it a little clean,

then get some consolidant in there.

Andrew's teapot is a classic example of 19th-century English bargeware,

so-called because it was popular with the canal workers

who passed through Burton-on-Trent, where most bargeware was made.

The teapots were often given as gifts on important occasions,

and many had miniature versions of the teapot moulded onto their lids.

I'm going to have to do some research and see if I can find out

exactly how the teapot should look.

Whether rare antique or common keepsake,

the Repair Shop team restores those family heirlooms

with sentimental value beyond compare.

-How are we doing?

-Hi, good to meet you.

-Likewise.

-Hi there, I'm Will.

-Dave.

-Nice to meet you.

Next, a job for Will.

Dave Croft has a family treasure he would like to hand down to future

generations in one piece.

My grandfather was a cabinet-maker,

and he made this as a wedding present for my grandmother.

That would have been in about 1918.

It's made of little bits of offcuts of wood.

I think where my grandfather was working,

they were building an oak staircase and he kept all the little offcuts of wood

and it's made, as you can see, of all these tiny blocks of wood,

triangles and squares.

-Yeah.

-All glued together.

Thrifty and very romantic.

I usually do that for my girlfriend for Valentine's and birthday,

carve up a love heart or something.

-Seriously?

-Not so expensive, but it goes a long way.

But I think it's such a romantic story, as well.

What's in this bag, then? You've got all of the...

-I've got everything.

-You've got all the bits.

-All the blocks are there.

It's always nice when someone turns up with a plastic bag

full of bits and pieces! It makes the job a lot easier.

Yeah. And how long has it been in the loft, in your house?

-Oh, 25-30 years at least.

-As long as that?

-Yeah.

This is the one piece of furniture that he made and it's the only piece

I've got, so that's important.

-Yeah.

-I do distinctly remember it

in the front room of my grandparents' house.

I can see it in my mind now, where it was in the corner of the room,

and it's a nice piece of furniture. I'd like to have it in the lounge,

but obviously with the bottom falling out and only three legs...

It won't stand up very well.

-That wasn't going to work!

-Right. Thanks a lot.

-Cheers.

In a way, I'm quite nervous.

The piece is unique, my grandfather made it.

Equally, it couldn't stay like it is.

It needs to be repaired.

There's so many loose pieces

and I'm just trying to work out what goes where.

Pretty much like a jigsaw puzzle at the moment.

Once I've done that, then I can glue it all together.

But this is a jigsaw with well over 100 pieces,

and no picture on the front of the box.

This is actually proving to be pretty tricky.

I thought that every single block would be exactly the same measurements.

However, on closer inspection, there are a few slightly smaller pieces.

It sort of goes to show the fact that this is such a bespoke piece,

not everything is exactly the same, which is quite nice,

but quite frustrating when you're trying to piece it back together.

Ceramicist Kirsten has her own puzzle to solve -

how to replace the missing tiny teapot on the lid

of the bargeware teapot

when she has absolutely no idea what it looked like.

So she turns to a 21st-century solution to a 19th-century conundrum.

The ones that look like Andrew's all seem to have this decorative finish,

so I think I'm going to

have a go at making one.

It's not actually unusual to have to make up a missing section on a piece

of ceramic or porcelain.

I've never made a miniature teapot before.

-Hello.

-Hi, Jay.

-Are you all right?

-Yeah, I'm fine, thank you.

-What are you doing?

-Ah...

-Making a mushroom.

-You're making a mushroom!

Remember, it's got to be a teapot, not a mushroom.

-Oh, yeah.

-Can I touch that?

Of course you can, yeah.

Doing this, I can get it absolutely, exactly how I want it,

-then stick it on there and then paint it.

-That's it.

Which will be the fun part, with this sort of treacly glaze.

Well, the fun part's this, isn't it? This is quite therapeutic.

-You're going to make a teapot shape into this.

-Yeah, yeah.

-All right, I'll do this.

-It's not a job for grown-ups, is it?

It is a job for grown-ups.

We all need to be children again, that's what we need to do.

-So make a ball...

-Yeah.

And then... My one's gone a bit dirty already.

What do you do with this, then? Just press it, like that?

You just use it for kind of shaping.

If you kind of look down on it, as well.

-My one's proper dodgy.

-Yeah. It's quite difficult, actually, to do.

That's it, Jay. That's it, Jay, you've got a perfect spout there.

-No, I haven't got it yet.

-Put that on the front of your mushroom, Jay.

Watch this now, watch.

Don't laugh, mate. I don't see you making one.

There you go. There's my teapot.

It's lovely. It looks like an oil can actually, doesn't it?

It does actually, doesn't it?

Perfect. Perfect teapot.

Come back in a couple of hours and we'll compare.

I've actually already stuck this on.

This is quite a sort of hard-drying putty,

to make the base to receive the baby teapot.

I'm going to smooth that and blend that in using some filler,

so it just looks like it's part of one piece,

rather than sort of blobbed on the top there.

-Hello.

-Hi, good day.

-How are you doing, you all right?

-I'm fine, yourself?

I'm very good, actually.

The next arrivals in need of some Repair Shop TLC

are James and Lisa Coetzee,

with a serious challenge for painting conservator Lucia.

Ooh, ooh, ooh.

This is beautiful, and I say "ooh" for a couple of reasons.

One, because it's beautiful, and, two, because it's so badly damaged,

and it's got massive tears in it.

We took it off the wall because we were redecorating

and it was up against the desk in James' study

and the children were playing hide and seek behind the desk,

and you can see they stuck pencils through and, yeah...

We weren't very happy.

They did get... Well, they got shouted at a lot.

This damage is quite considerable. Who is the artist?

It's my grandmother's uncle.

-Fred Appleyard.

-Right.

-He was an English artist.

-I know that name.

Who was born in Middlesbrough.

He is a very well-known artist and I know that there is a painting of his

at the Tate and he did a lot of work at the Royal Academy.

-He did have exhibitions there.

-How much is that worth, then?

-Do you know?

-No idea.

I mean, certainly in the tens of thousands, I would think.

-Is it?

-It's very collectable,

and people will buy it regardless of the damage,

because they would expect to get it restored.

But there's a lot of work to be done and these tears are so extensive,

I'm not sure that they will be successfully repaired,

they might just sink in on themselves.

-OK.

-But we'll have a try at repairing them locally.

Because one of the important things about conservation

is to keep it in as original condition as possible.

So, thanks a lot, leave it with us and we'll get back to you.

Thank you.

Wow. I can't...

Well, two things, I can't believe it's worth the amount

that she thinks it might be worth,

and also, how the hell is she going to repair it, anyway?

It looks terrible.

-JAMES:

-The damage looks quite extensive

when you look at it in detail.

Actually, I'd forgotten how bad it was, until we got it out of the roof and had another look.

I'm scared to touch it. That's a lot of money there.

I know, it's a lot of money, but it is massively collectable.

So this artist is a good artist, then?

-A very good artist.

-Because you smiled, it was unbelievable,

-like a Cheshire cat.

-It's so great to have a professional artist's work

in front of me, it's just wonderful.

-Let's get you working on it.

-Thank you, slave driver.

-You take it to your desk, I'll take that. I'm not touching it.

-OK.

-All right?

-Yeah, here we go.

Lucia will need to draw on her many years of experience to fix this

perforated painting,

but first a job that requires another of the team's specialist skills.

Will, can you come and have a look at the frame, please, for me?

-Thank you.

-How's it going?

-Well, we've got the problem of the painting's been nailed into the frame.

-Right.

And you can see that there's no room between the painting and the

edge of the frame. Look how tight it is.

You can't even get this spatula down the edge.

-It's absolutely jammed into the frame.

-Yeah.

-Jammed in.

The window of the frame needs to be opened up.

So it needs...the edge that the painting is sitting on needs to be widened.

How many mil do you think?

-Not much, a couple of mils each side.

-Three mil all round?

Three mil all round should do it.

Do you mind popping the painting out, so I can have a look?

OK, so I think we have to be very careful about taking the nails out,

because I don't want to gouge the original canvas.

The original canvas, yeah. Let's see if we can...

One thing we have to resist is any pressure on the canvas.

-Yeah, of course.

-It shouldn't be anywhere near that.

If I slip that under... Oh, that's an easy peasy lemon squeezy.

-Excellent.

-Yeah, right.

That's one.

Perfect.

-Oh!

-I know, it's exhausting, isn't it?

And it's nerve-racking.

Perfect. OK, so this should, if all the nails are out, come out.

Yes.

Da-dah!

-Three mil is going to come to about...

-Do you know what,

-can you do it bigger? Do it...

-Four mil?

-Yeah.

-Thank you very much.

-Cool, I'll leave those pincers there.

-OK.

Across the workshop,

Kirsten is about to begin painting her own tour de force,

the tiny teapot she has hand-sculpted to go on top

of its larger sibling.

I'll build up the layers as I go along,

and I'm going to leave these little areas here,

because they're sort of white anyway.

I'll decorate those probably towards the end.

-Are you all right?

-Yeah, I'm good.

I'm just kind of finishing off here, really.

Oh, there's the little pot. Oh, come on!

-Is that strong enough to be lifted?

-That should be fine.

I know you don't like me touching anything on your desk.

I would always hold underneath, anything like that,

but, yeah, that can just go on there like that now.

Now complete with its brand-new diminutive companion,

this very special heirloom is ready to be reunited with Andrew and its

next custodian, his granddaughter, 16-month-old Lily.

Lily will never truly know her mother,

but I thought that the teapot could act as some sort of reminder,

to help her understand her mother,

but also the lineage back through

to her great-great- great-grandmother and grandfather.

What a great way to relate a story to a young child, actually,

you know, through an object like that.

If it acts as a vehicle,

a means to explain that family history and to bring that history alive,

then it'll have achieved an enormous amount for us.

-Hello.

-Jay, nice to see you again.

-How are we doing?

-Kirsten, nice to see you again.

-Lovely to see you, Andrew.

-Can I introduce you to our family?

-Please do.

-Nick, our son-in-law.

Hi, Nick, lovely to meet you.

-Jane, my wife.

-Hello, pleased to meet you.

-And not forgetting Lily, our granddaughter.

-Hello, Lily.

-Are you ready for this one?

-Yeah, I am.

Yes, I won't keep you in suspense.

Exciting, yes.

Oh, wow.

-Wow.

-Oh, fantastic.

-That's incredible.

-I love the piece on the top, the little finial.

You've totally brought it back to life, so thank you very much.

Oh, I'm so pleased.

And I hope that in years to come Lily will be chuffed as well.

-Yeah.

-That's going to be yours one day, Lily.

-Wow.

-You've transformed it, thank you very much.

-JANE:

-That's clever, isn't it?

To have it restored to its former glory is something very special.

Oh, I'm delighted that I could do it for you.

I hope that Alice is looking down on us and appreciating what we've done,

-so thank you.

-Oh, I do hope so.

We're so grateful that you've kept this in our family,

in such wonderful condition.

Well, it's been a pleasure for me to work on it, so, yeah.

Thank you.

It's an immaculate transformation. I'm so impressed with it,

and it's great that Lily's going to have an heirloom that's in pristine

condition and hopefully she can pass on to her daughter one day.

It's now complete, and that's very special.

Lucia is working on another valuable heirloom,

a painting perforated with pencils by the owners' children.

I am fixing the paint along the edges of the canvas that is torn,

because the paint is all very broken in those areas,

and if I don't fix it, or help keep it in place

while I'm repairing the tears, we'll lose more of the original paint.

So it's my job as a conservator to maintain as much of the original

material as is physically possible.

Having made sure no new damage can occur,

Lucia can start work on knitting back together

the painting's gaping wounds.

So what I'm going to do now is turn it over...

..and start working on the canvas at the back, the edges of the tears,

and using moisture, or introducing moisture, with blotting paper.

A lot of the canvas fibres have been stretched and distorted

by the damage, so they're longer and thinner than they were.

This moisture treatment can shrink them back, to a certain extent.

If they're too long, I'll just have to trim the edges,

but for the most part, they should all meet up again.

-Hello, my Mona Lisa. How are we doing?

-Hello, my darling.

-Hold on a minute.

-OK, these are the tears.

Yeah, or was the tears.

Or were the tears, yeah.

I've done the tear repair, more or less.

These are the little holes that were the pencil holes.

-Yeah.

-And I've put nylon gossamer patches on them.

I'm really impressed with what you've done here.

-It's fixed.

-This area isn't finished yet, because it's still drying.

You can see that it's a bit more damaged, it's a bigger tear,

and I've got to do a bit more work to bring the fibres together,

the actual strands of the weave.

-Yeah.

-But you can see it's not quite meeting.

So say, like, that one doesn't form, because the fibres are not...

What can you do? Would you then put the tissue on there or something?

Yes, well, I'll make a piece that will go on top like that.

-Right.

-And it will seal it.

And then I'll work from the front and fill it.

So how long have you been restoring paintings and stuff like that?

-A long time.

-A long time?

20-odd years. A long time, yeah, yeah.

It's a passion, it's a vocation.

-Right.

-It takes years of practice, once you've been trained.

So working on a piece like this, how does it make you feel?

Because this is, like, quite an expensive piece.

-Yeah.

-You've probably worked on expensive stuff before.

Yeah, I work on quite a few valuable works of art, yeah.

-Yeah?

-I'm not sort of scared of the value of a painting at all.

Everybody gets treated the same.

You have to absolutely do the best for the object, the artist's integrity.

Keep my intervention to a minimum.

With the structure of the canvas repaired,

Lucia can now turn her attention to the front

and preparing it for the final stage - repainting.

I have to fill the losses as a result of the tears.

I'm using an acrylic filler for this.

So I apply the fill and try and

keep it very localised.

The fill material is quite soft, it needs to be,

but it also needs to have a bit of plasticity to it,

so I can very gently push in the fill into the canvas,

and then that will go off and then I have to rub it down.

And when I say rub it down, it's a very gentle process,

because we're dealing with a very thin paint there.

And I'm actually using a dental tool.

This piece of equipment I've actually had for a few decades

and I've kept it because it's the best tool I've found

to do the filling.

It's a bit of a delicate process,

and takes quite a bit of time and patience to do.

Time and patience are also being tested at Will's bench.

He's been piecing together the cabinet made of hundreds

of wood offcuts.

With every section secured,

Will finds another making a bid for freedom.

So, as you can see...

This side, especially, is

all over the place.

I mean, I think the fact that it's been possibly near a radiator

or something, or facing a window, so you've got the heat from the sun,

has meant that the wood has shrunk, the glue has dried,

and the pieces are pretty loose.

There is that temptation to take every single piece out

and glue every single piece back in, but I think there's probably

a high risk of something going wrong,

me misplacing the pieces or not putting them back

in the right order.

So I think the safest thing to do would be to feed

some wood glue back in there,

so when it dries, it dries flat and solid.

With so much work to do,

Will calls in reinforcements for the final touches,

before owner Dave returns to pick it up.

When it's time to clean the windows, you know it's the final furlong.

It looks special.

Cool. Happy?

-Like a hippo.

-Good.

Wrap him up.

-Hello, Dave, how are we doing?

-Hi, how you doing?

-You all right?

-Who've we got here, then?

-This is Abigail.

-Pleased to meet you.

-All right?

-So obviously you've come along for your cabinet.

-Yeah.

-Is that right?

Do you like the colour blue?

I'm only joking!

-Ready for this one?

-Be really careful, won't you, pulling it off,

because that could be disastrous!

OK, nice and slow.

Wow, that looks good.

Wow, that looks great.

-Wow.

-Superb.

-So, what do you think?

-Yeah, it's amazing, so much better than it was when it came.

I have had a bit of an interesting time with this cabinet!

-Oh, dear.

-Thankfully, it's all together now.

I do think it might have been near to a radiator or a window or something,

where it's had heat, hot and cold,

because the wood has definitely shrunk and warped.

So getting the pieces back in the bottom was slightly tricky.

-Yeah.

-Apart from all that...

Apart from all that, yeah, on a lighter note...

It makes it sound really bad!

It really was a pleasure to work on this,

knowing that the last person to work on it was your grandfather.

Where's it going to go now, then?

-Where are you going to put it?

-In the lounge, and nowhere near a radiator!

-Yeah, of course.

-Absolutely brilliant, I'm really pleased.

Thank you very much indeed.

I'm feeling very happy about the restored cabinet, it looks really good.

It's a family heirloom now.

It reminds me of my grandfather and my grandmother, actually.

So it's a piece of them back with us.

Come on then, let's go and do some more.

Back in the workshop,

Lucia has reached a crucial stage in the restoration of the painting by

English artist Fred Appleyard,

painting over the repairs to match the original artwork.

So I have to do a little bit of colour matching

directly on top of the filling,

and when I'm finished,

it should all be virtually invisible.

Will, do you have the frame?

Pretty as a picture, as ever!

-Shall we...

-Try it.

It should fit in there very well.

Perfect. Perfect.

-Thumbs up?

-Thank you.

-Two thumbs, yeah!

-You're a good man.

-All right?

-Hi, Jay, yeah. Do you want to have a look?

It's fitted into the frame.

I'm not bothered about the frame, look what you've done.

I know, it's not bad.

Not bad... You've done a brilliant job!

-Thank you, Jay.

-I think it's flawless, what you've done.

-You are kind.

-No, you have.

-Thanks very much.

-Here we go, I'll take my hat off to you.

See that head of yours, it's lovely.

Brought a smile to your face.

I think when Lisa and James see the painting they'll be very happy

to have it hanging back on the wall,

and that certainly is the best place to put that painting,

back on the wall, enjoy it.

I think they'll be very pleased to see it all back in one piece.

70 miles away,

James and Lisa are about to be reunited with their work of art,

ready to take pride of place on their wall.

I'm hoping that it's actually going to look better than we've ever seen.

She did say it would be a big challenge to repair the rips, though.

Yeah, I can't believe it can be repaired.

Wow.

That is amazing.

-Look at that.

-You can't see any of the holes.

Or the rips. There were several rips there and the holes were mostly

-there, weren't they?

-And there was a rip along there.

-Yeah, look at that.

-You can hardly make them out.

-You would never, ever know.

-I won't be putting it back in the loft.

-No, that's true.

Totally exceeded my expectations.

I didn't think it would ever look as good as it does.

To have an ancestor of mine produce that painting is a great privilege

to me, really, and it's just great to have an heirloom back in pristine condition.

The children are going to have to keep a safe distance away.

They can just look at it, no touching.

Lovely to have the painting back in the family, back on the wall.

Yeah, it's where it should be.

Join us next time for more masterpieces rescued for posterity,

and more heirlooms restored for future generations

in The Repair Shop.