The Repair Shop, however, needs a base level of emotion to succeed, and trying to prise any identifiable emotion from a member of the royal family is a painfully fruitless endeavour. The items Charles offers to be repaired – a clock and a vase, possibly damaged because it fell off a window ledge at some point, Charles shrugs – have no sentimental value to him whatsoever. When they are eventually restored to their former glory (beautifully and faithfully, as always), the best he can do is offer a handful of distant platitudes. “How marvellous,” he repeats over and over again, and “Wonderful”, the same way he would if he was being given a tour of a new municipal swimming pool in Peterborough. It’s so rote that at one point I feared Charles would fully disassociate and ask the vase: “So what is it that you do?”
And you sense that The Repair Shop knew this, because it’s smart enough to hide an actual episode of The Repair Shop in with all the royalty. Sandwiched between the Dumfries items, we meet a woman called Nicola. A normal woman, who wants an everyday household object restored: a cast-iron soldier, broken and blackened, that housed a set of fireplace tools. The soldier is significant, Nicola says, because it belonged to her husband, who has recently died of cancer.
Bang. Tears. Instant tears, as Nicola explains that she had wanted to get it repaired to present to her husband as a final gift, but ran out of time. And more tears, too, when she is presented with a gleaming, restored soldier at the end of the episode.
This is what The Repair Show is. That soldier had no monetary worth, no historical value. On paper, it didn’t need to be saved. But it meant everything to Nicola, and so it became invaluable. Compared with this, the King’s expensive ornaments come off as little more than expensive clutter. It doesn’t really matter if they can’t fix it, because he has palaces full of more just like it. But Nicola’s soldier? She wouldn’t part with it for all the money in the world.
There’s a chance that this episode of The Repair Shop will be watched by more people than usual, because of all the royal rubbernecking it promises. But if these people come for Charles, they’ll stay for Nicola. The Repair Shop is a magic formula, and this episode is proof that it really doesn’t need to be messed with.
Guardian
