Seven years ago Jay Blades was like one of those broken jukeboxes or scrapheap toys that tearful punters bring to his Repair Shop. At 45, after half a lifetime of knocks and scrapes he couldn’t see a future for himself. His solution one night was to get into his car, overloaded with a sense of pain and failure, and drive away from his home and his business and his wife and his daughter in High Wycombe through the night to he didn’t know where.
He ended up in a McDonald’s car park in Wolverhampton having just about avoided writing off the car and himself on a motorway bridge. He sat in the car in that car park for hours and then days, eventually sobbing his way back to life. With the help of a friend in the city, and that friend’s parents who “adopted” him, he started to remake and mend himself. Looking back on that period now, he says the closest he can come to describing it is a feeling like drowning and then coming up for air, a rebirth. In the years since, he says, he has never stopped being overjoyed that he can breathe.
Though he had never been to Wolverhampton before that drive, he stayed in the city, made a new life there. On the sweltering lunchtime we meet, he’s driven down from the Midlands to central London to do some more filming for his TV show and launch a DIY book. “It’s almost as if I’ve got two birthplaces,” he tells me. “I had London, then I got Wolverhampton. Everybody feels good at home. And I feel good there.”
He’s chosen to have lunch at the Holborn Dining Room at the Rosewood Hotel, a grand old brasserie in a building that used to be the imperial home of the Pearl Assurance Company. The place has a bit of symbolic value for Blades. When The Repair Shop started to become successful, he asked a mate to recommend a fancy place to stay for a weekend in the Smoke. The friend thought he would enjoy the vast marble staircase at the Rosewood and he wasn’t wrong. Blades spent all weekend taking pictures. “I’ve never seen a staircase like it, just insanely beautiful,” he says, with his big grin.
You felt like you’d arrived?
He laughs, leans into my voice recorder. “You come to this place,” he says, “and you’ve got someone whose job it is to settle you in and say hello, then someone comes with the water jug, then someone who brings your plates, and then check this out, there is a different someone who brings us salt and pepper … ”
To get a sense of some of the pain Blades escaped from, it’s worth reading his memoir, Making It. It’s not a misery memoir, far from it, but it tells of how Blades’s father left when he was a baby – he later discovered that “the man who contributed to my birth” had 25 other kids. Raised hard by his mother in a council flat in Hackney, at secondary school he knew a lot of violence, first on the receiving end of racist bullying, later mostly giving the bullies and the racists a pasting. He was severely dyslexic and struggled to read and write. He stumbled through a period on the edge of drug dealing and a lot of street fighting in his early 20s, navigating multiple failed relationships, the fatherhood of two kids and homelessness. He found salvation first in social work, then by getting a degree in criminology from Buckinghamshire New University (where he is now chancellor) and finally – with his first wife – in finding broken things and finding people like himself to put them back together.
Part of his ongoing fix-up involves looking after himself. He did 100 press-ups, like he does every day, before he set off in the car at six this morning. He orders what he always orders, he says: “Fish of the day – halibut – a plate of broccoli and some water.”
“I live on fish and veg,” he says. “I eat meat once a month when we go around to my ‘second mum’s’ house in Wolverhampton. Basically she cooks up a heavy Jamaican diet: curried goat, cow foot, Saturday soup, and my favourite, corned beef and rice. But that’s it for me for a month.”
He’s grateful to be sitting down doing this interview, eating this “wow halibut”, he says, because it was an interview with the Guardian film team that got him going on TV. A documentary crew from the paper came along to his original workshop in High Wycombe – where he would work with local craftsmen restoring and giving a twist to salvaged furniture, while mentoring troubled young kids in life and in a trade.
He found he was a natural on camera. “The thing I love doing on TV is influencing people I’m never going to meet,” he says. “There still aren’t too many people my colour on TV, certainly not in the craft world. I classify myself as being from the mud. It’s an elitist world. And I’d like it to be more accessible.”
He only got into interiors when he finally got a place of his own. As a kid in the 1970s, style was about clothes – “My mum was with a guy called Lloyd McFarland at one time. And he really turned me on to looking good. The way he dressed, he looked like a destination. Like a postcode…” – but he always noticed the way things looked. He thinks in part it was to do with his dyslexia – when you can’t really read or write, he says, you are constantly compensating by taking in as much information as you can from elsewhere, searching for clues, memorising stuff.
He’s still working on his reading – weekly lessons – and he’s had a colleague read him the menu to memorise before we arrive. He is a powerful advocate these days not only for the 10% of the population who are dyslexic, but also for education that allows kids to work with their hands. “This land was built on worker bees. And then you take that ability to make something away from young people, what are they going to do?”
One of the first things he did when he was elected chancellor at Buckinghamshire New University was to get them to reinstate a furniture design course that had been scrapped. The university is based in High Wycombe which, as Blades discovered, was the furniture capital of England – G-Plan and Ercol and Parker Knoll had factories there, making postwar furniture that was built to last, and which has now, partly with his help, come back into vogue. (“I do love me a good G-Plan sideboard,” he says.) He has also created a scholarship that helped with the fees of five to seven people a year at the university from backgrounds like his.
He’s in touch with enough of the people he grew up with to know that most don’t make it out. But he also knows – just as any Repair Shop devotee knows – that second chances are possible. “I get up these days and I know it’s going to be a good day,” he says. “No matter what rubbish comes to me.”
In the past when he encountered everyday racism he always got his retaliation in first. How does he deal with it these days?
“When I come across it these days it’s very subtle,” he says. “The old days you’d have someone spitting at you. These days I think it’s my role to educate people around race. I do talk a lot about black history. But I also love black future.”
For him, he hopes that the future will always involve The Repair Shop, which has gone through a remarkable 10 series in five years, and which now has versions all over the world. He guessed when he first walked into the workshop it might be a special show. For a start it was like a medieval guild – “all the crafts together in one space: wood, art, clocks, ceramics, leather, you name it”. But then with the first “reveal” they did – a woman crying over her memories of a restored piano stool – he knew that they were really on to something. Antiques Roadshow had long proved that people invest profound emotions in objects; The Repair Shop offered a way for them to redeem them, let them out. From that first show Blades made a point of not knowing the backstory of the people who came in, so that he could discover it on camera along with the rest of us.
He hopes, he says, finishing up his lunch – tea, no pudding – that he can go on doing the show for 20 years. “What has happened to us as adults is we lose a lot of our imagination. Kids see stuff. I try to add a childlike mentality to things,” he grins. “You know what, Tim, the other day I literally skipped along the street. A 52-year-old man. Why? Because I am happy.”
DIY with Jay by Jay Blades (Pan Macmillan, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• This article was amended on 19 September 2022. Jay Blades studied, and was later appointed chancellor, at Buckinghamshire New University rather than Buckingham New University as an earlier version said.
