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A sewing competition? It's hardly tailor-made for thrills


Claudia Winkleman will host The Great British Sewing Bee Claudia Winkleman will host The Great British Sewing Bee
Every day this week, there are food shows on the telly. From Masterchef to Hairy Bikers, Come Dine With Me to The Great British Bake Off, it seems we’ve got a gluttonous appetite for cookery on the box.
It’s all about recipes and ingredients, the subtleties of preparation and presentation. Or is it?
While Si, Dave, Mary and Paul are revealing their culinary secrets, millions of viewers are chewing over more basic thoughts: ‘I fancy a plate of that. I wonder if there are any crisps left?’
Food appeals to our deepest animal instincts. Clothes, however, don’t.
The way to a man’s heart, as the proverb says, is through his stomach ... not up his elegantly tailored shirt-sleeve.
That’s what dooms The Great British Sewing Bee to failure.
Home-made clothes don’t answer a primal need. It was mildly interesting, for ten minutes, to learn about the history of pattern books and how the A-line skirt got its name.
Mildly interesting; not gripping.
Eight contestants were striving to impress the judges with their sewing skills, knocking up garments from scratch against a deadline.
The researchers had obviously struggled to find any male seamstresses, so they’d come up with  Stuart, a fitness instructor who had never stitched a skirt before, and Mark, a lorry driver whose hobby was making ‘steampunk’ (a futuristic take on Victoriana) costumes for  sci-fi conventions.

Easily the most impressive of the eight was Ann, a 75-year-old yoga enthusiast. We first met her hanging upside down in the lotus position.
She’d been sewing ever since she started making clothes for her dolls as a child.
 
 
Historian Tom Fort made the same mistake on Crossing England In A Punt ¿ his journey down the River Trent had the feel of an educational programme for schoolsHistorian Tom Fort made the same mistake on Crossing England In A Punt ¿ his journey down the River Trent had the feel of an educational programme for schools
Today her work is of a professional standard, but I still didn’t want to spend an hour watching her put pleats and darts in.
Judge and Savile Row tailor Patrick Grant emerged as a wryly mannered wit. Holding up one blouse, he sniffed: ‘It’s good from afar, but it’s far from good.’
And after declaring that most dress-making was the art of simple measurements, he took one look at the bustline of a well-endowed model and said: ‘It’s  complex geometry in there.’
For long stretches, though, the programme was as engaging as an instructional video.
Naturalist Nigel Marven¿s infectious enthusiasm, on the other hand, lit up Whale Adventure.Naturalist Nigel Marven¿s infectious enthusiasm, on the other hand, lit up Whale Adventure.
Historian Tom Fort made the same mistake on Crossing England In A Punt — his journey down the River Trent had the feel of an educational programme for schools.
There were beautifully composed shots of poppies and cowslips in  riverbank meadows, mallards and mute swans floating on the currents, but the commentary ignored the evocative and went straight for Gradgrindian facts.
The Trent is 170 miles long, Fort recited; it rises on Biddulph Moor, almost 1,000ft above sea level; James Brindley began the Trent and Mersey canal in 1766; it requires ten pints of water to make one pint of beer; in Stoke during the Seventies there were 200 ceramics factories and now there are only 30.
What could have been a personal paean to vanishing England became a GCSE geography lesson.
Naturalist Nigel Marven’s infectious enthusiasm, on the other hand, lit up Whale Adventure.
When a harpooned whale dragged a wooden boat at high speed across the waves, 19th- century whalers called it the  ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. Marven’s four-part documentary up the American west coast, following the grey whale migration, had that same breakneck feel.
Last night he ventured out between the ice floes into the  Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean to watch whales feeding on shrimp-like creatures called amphipoda. In the silver-blue water under a midnight sun, these mammals looked like sea monsters — filmed from the air, their immense bulks shone ghost-like under the water.
 
Marven was full of facts, too — the musk ox has the longest hair in the animal kingdom, for instance — but his delivery was never stuffy: the information just seemed to burst out of him.
In the end, this travel documentary was sheer romance, where its BBC Four rival was as dry as a school textbook. Beyond the boundaries of one Alaskan town, Barrow, the inhabitants had to dump heaps of whalebone and blubber, to attract the local polar bears and discourage them from wandering down the main street.
You don’t get that in Burton- on-Trent.
 
 
 

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