It’s been ages since I’ve been to Eastnor Pottery. I don’t quite know why that is – mostly I think I just got out of the habit of making sure I had a future session booked into my diary, and they were so busy last year that I couldn’t just book a slot at short notice. They were riding the wave of interest spawned by the Great Pottery Throwdown programme on BBC2 in autumn 2015, which led to them putting on 50 weekend workshops last year, and being pretty much full up for most of them. That’s a far cry from the 6-8 weekend workshops per year they typically held prior to the programme airing – such is the power of television!
My sister bought me a gift voucher for the pottery for Christmas, and that made me realise how much I’d missed it. I got back in touch with them, and was able to book a slot last Sunday. I spent the day throwing small lidded pots – my mother has commissioned a small pot to hold marmalade. It’s hard to get pots and lids to match in size, even when using calipers to give an indication, so I threw seven of each and will then pick the best-matched pair to finish next time I’m there. All the others will be recycled, so there will be no waste.
I was talking to Jon the Potter about the Great Pottery Throwdown phenomenon. He reckons that much of the pent-up demand it caused has now just about worked through the system, though he’s still planning far more weekend workshops than he put on before the programme aired. He said that he could really do with another series being shown to stimulate another peak in demand. Apparently, one has indeed been filmed and is in the can. However, the production company has fallen out spectacularly with the BBC – it’s the same company that is behind the Great British Bakeoff, which has moved acrimoniously to Channel4. So there is no date set for screening the programme. That’s a shame – it was fun to watch, and it certainly prodded a lot of people to explore their latent interest in throwing. But from a selfish point of view, it does at least mean that I can get a short-notice access to a potter’s wheel when I feel the urge to throw something!
