The Great British Baking Show is over, but you can scratch that itch with this series

One of my favorite scenes in Disney/Pixar Toy Story 2 is the film in which Woody, a beloved and worn-out old cowboy doll, is repaired and detailed by a man who fixes toys for a living. Loose stitches were sewn onto his shirt and Woody’s dull eyes were polished to a high shine with a Q-tip. In the end, it is like new. The scene is essentially an on-camera reinvention, a cinematic style I will never tire of.

While it’s fun to watch Andy glow, it’s not quite as satisfying as the real-life transformations in The Repair Shop, the beloved British series that’s now available for free He is Toby, Where vintage toys, tools, furniture and other items are restored to their former glory by an army of expert craftsmen.

The repair shop houses skilled craftsmen trained in arts that seem to be on the verge of extinction. Leathersmiths, blacksmiths, and horologists (this show is more committed to horology than the watch-focused final season of The Gilded Age – He looks) Charged with restoring and repairing old family heirlooms.

Episodes often begin like Antiques Roadshow, with a character arriving at an old salvage barn with a canopy roof and explaining the source of their beloved, usually broken, piece. The show then turns into something akin to Ask This Old House, as we watch highly trained artists and builders being called upon to work their magic. They match paint colors, sew individual tufts of fur onto stuffed animals, or make brand new wooden table legs that match old ones. It keeps beloved items alive, all while a bed of soothing music plays softly in the background.

The Repair Shop has aired elsewhere in past years. But this month, now after my cozy, comforting offer, The Great British Baking ShowThat’s it, I returned my attention to the repair shop. In the same way that you often wonder how contestants on The Baking Show know the difference between Swiss and Italian meringue, the stars of The Repair Shop are similarly impressive, as experts use precise tools to make subtle, often imperceptible repairs.

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The show, now in its fifteenth season, airs on BBC One in the UK. The BBC One website describes it as a “warming antidote to throwaway culture”, and I couldn’t have described it better. As someone who is interested in repairing old things and extending their life (if you need me, I’m usually buried deep in #VisualRepair and #kintsugi hashtags on IG), in Britain there are some great shows dedicated to this topic.

The Repair Shop may be the most popular, but there are a couple of other great shops, Money for nothing and Saved and remadealso present in Tobi; You can spend days watching them and get inspired to save instead of throwing away old, broken things. Every time I pass a pile of old furniture on the sidewalk, I always think: “I can fix that!” These shows allow me to live vicariously. (I don’t have the storage space to pursue my dream of becoming a professional trash flipper, unfortunately.)

The closest thing we have to television in the United States may be HGTV’s Flea Market Flip. But it’s a very different atmosphere to its British counterparts, especially because it’s a competition series where people resell the items they restore to see who can make the most money.

Although I love the cool, artistic side of The Repair Shop, there’s really something to be said for its mission, which is to remind us not to live life in a disposable way and to put some thought and care into what we have. It’s a message rarely seen on mainstream television, but The Repair Shop is proof that there is an audience for it.