All the gossip about Keith is coming out.

New Year, New Potters.

Bonjour, hi! Long time no see – and I truly apologise for that, I have no better excuse than that I may have tasted the mental health crisis rainbow last year and so between my essential amino acids not pulling their weight in the ol’ serotonin production facility (WORK HARDER YOU SERFS) and the fact Channel 4 has tried to take away my screencapping abilities (not this time, suckers! I’m the Robin Hood of reaction JPEGs) this is a slow and steady reintroduction to the Recap-o-sphere so I’m sorry if they take a couple of days longer to get out (although hopefully not as long as this time, this week just happened to be a mix of Dental Trauma and meetings that could have been emails – I’ll let you decide which is worst) but I’m a bit rusty and a bit wibbly-wobbly brainy-wainy, but I’m sure I’ll catch my speed soon enough! And I am desperate to start doing them, my family have started shoving cheese in their ears when I start talking about TV to them.

So before this becomes too much of a trauma dump about how much I do not want to watch the Andrew Tate Documentary that got advertised EVERY ADVERT BREAK, on with the show! And the 12 new potters who we have to once again hope are harbingers of an at this point we just pray moderately stable new year – the 2023 cohort did NOT come through for us

here are their Instagram handles:
Andrew – Andrew_Macbean-Ceramics
Cadi – Cadi_f
Dan – Sandy_Pots
Daniel – Ceramics.by.Dan
Dave – DaveShort.Pottery
Donna – OTO.NI.Pottery
Edward – EdwardKingCeramics_
Jan – PlanetJanetCeramics
Princess – Princess_Fingall
Shani – PolwarePottery
Steven – Steb_Pots
Sophie – Sophie.Wootton.Design

and here they are as their limited edition Pot Trumps Trading Cards

(hey, Throwdown… contact me for merch opportunities!)

The Front of House Team hasn’t changed at all, Siobhan is still there with a haircut that your mum will comment on every time without failure

Rose is present and allowed opinions now! (she’s coming for your gig Rich, sleep with one eye open!)

and of course our head judges are Rich and Keith, the latter of which has decided that after 6 series it was time to give himself a catchphrase that gives his tear ducts a bit of respite (the captioneers did him a favour by not captioning it as “Luvvie” every time)

personally I’m still a bigger fan of [Keith blubs].

Let’s Get This Roast a Cookin’

For their introduction to Gladstone the potters were having to make a 6 piece Roast Dinner Set including a plate, a gravy boat with saucer, salt and pepper pots and an entirely superfluous mustard pot that will inevitably end up being used as a marginally more useful sugar basin because who in the year of our Lord 2024 is decanting the Colmans?

The sets did obviously have to be somewhat personalised and relate to the potters and while most of them went for extremely novelty or outright absurd (we’ll get to Franz Klammer the Salt Pot eventually) a couple went for sentimentality having not realised Keith was trying to put his tearful days behind him

both Donna and Steven were making piece’s inspired by roast dinners at their grandmothers’ houses – Donna outright recreating hers in a monotone red slip trail illustration

while Steven went for something a little more designed, including a Mustard Pot that looks like what people in the 1950s thought houses in 2023 would look like and a pair of Non-Brand Specific Fizzy Pop salt and a pepper shakers

I’m glad that nans and great aunts only serving mixer-sized cans of fizzy drinks is apparently a universal experience – like every culture having some sort of iteration on a blood sausage, it’s just the human experience.

Princess was also going for a family-based design although hers was somehow even more abstract and tenuous than Franz Klammer being immortalised as a salt pot

it’s a very pretty, perfectly lovely design but the explanation of it being inspired by a seaside holiday did sound a little bit like she looked over her shoulder and saw Jan lovingly sculpting a boardgame playing Beagle and whispers of Franz Klammer cosplay and just sort of panickedly wove a tale – I’m hoping she’s just keeping her cards close to her chest and playing the first episode a little safe, which is a fair tactic given there’s 12 people in the room and you can rely on someone to dig their own grave

and when not shouting “I’M THE FIRST BOOT!” at the clouds or doing his best Charles Dance impression in the back garden

Andrew was bringing to life my favourite ever creation to ski out of Gladstone – Austrian ski racer, Franz Klammer as a salt pot

do I wish every piece was inspired by the Austrian themed fancy dress party he went to? YES! Give me Conchita Wurst the gravy boat, Sigmund Freud the useless mustard pot and Schrodinger’s Dinner Plate! Instead it was all a bit of a vague gesture at a “Friends and family theme” in which he was putting A LOT of faith in his newly acquired drawing skills

You don’t understand, I love him.

Jan had a very similar theme, as in her family has a boardgame night, although I don’t think hers involve slinging drinks at one another like a pair of drag queens having it off in Untucked

but I could be wrong, I don’t know how she had her family choose to play Monopoly, perhaps Hero the Dog loves to throw a drink or two

and with that, Pet Wars have officially began as the potters race to immortalise their family pets in clay – the show would like to ensure that Andrew does not in fact have Franz Klammer tied up to his porch.

Also throwing her hat firmly into Dog Wars was Cadi whose dog was getting a marginally less flattering immortalisation as a gravy boat

but the war between Cadi and Jan didn’t end at their dogs as they seemed to be in a loggerheaded race to see who could get the filthiest the quickest and in the blink of an eye Cadi had showed her apron who was boss

and Jan looked like she was smearing on war paint for Stoke-based guerilla warfare

she’ll take you all out without you even knowing she was coming.

Dave was being a bit stealthier with his deployment of the Pet Seeking Missile, choosing to hide his dog under the gravy boat (The RSPCA advises against this)

funnily enough, “Hidden Dog” is also my favourite yoga position – it’s when you sign up for a yoga class with a friend but then drop out thus making them go on their own.
The rest of Dave’s set was based on the canoe that he built himself and which has rapidly become Rich’s new obsession – 3D printers are so last season

and as well as building a canoe, Dave has also built himself an extremely silly bicycle

and a car that looks a bit like one of The Borrowers fashioned a tin can into an automobile that wouldn’t pass an MOT if you bribed the inspector

and he’s also a very talented niche innuendo engineer

oh, is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?

And as Rich fawned over Dave’s homemade canoe, the melancholy notes of Dancing On My Own began to play as Dan looked at his own box of 3D printed tools

sorry babe, Rich has bigger cans to noe now!

Dan’s second-to-a-canoe 3D printed tools were being used to create the text on his gravy jug which was meant to look like fish and chips wrapped in paper to complete his seafront themed set

I’m going to say it, a disappointing lack of gravy boats that involved animals vomiting gravy – would it have killed him to turn The Infamous Seagull into a gravy spewing terror of Brighton?

I think this is why they didn’t end up making a batch of Bisto Test Gravy – Cadi is the only person that delivered and it’s difficult to gauge how much gravy you can fit in a shih tzu.

Full Name Daniel was aso going for an alternate take on the sunday roast, opting to design his to look more akin to a Cantonese brunch

and he was taking A LOT of time to perfect the steamer basket mustard pot (which sounds like a sleeper agent activation code) which was concerning Siobhan a little bit and he may have unwittingly declared himself The Derek of the Season

hey, he got to keep his full name, someone had to bring him down a peg or two. Although she’ll have her hands full between Dereking Daniel and shouting at Sophie to enjoy herself like a parent that thinks they’re being helpful but are actually giving their child a complex

(my mother would like you all to know that this is not from personal experience)

And while Sophie was being Clockwork Orange’d into being the perfect Pottery Throwdown candidate, she was making a roast dinner set that could only ever be used at Easter and sadly did not involve a gravy barfing animal despite there being ample opportunities

that chicken’s Instagram selfie lips were practically pegging to be a gravy funnel – I can only apologise for that phrase but it exists now and we must simply let it fly.

Lastly we have Shani and Edward who were both going for floral motifs – with Shani opting for lotus flowers as a nod to her Buddhist beliefs

and an absolutely massive gravy boat as a nod to the fact she has 4 boys and as someone who has two brothers, I can confirm 90% of a teen boy’s diet is Bisto, the other 10% is the unstoppable urge to randomly kick things

but while most of the potters concentrated on the importance of building roast dinner sets, Shani was building the most important thing of all *rapport*

It does look slightly menacing given she’s brandishing a garotting wire but the sentiment was clear – you can never underestimate the social game

my sweet baby angel lightning rod for fate.

Edward’s floral inspiration came from his partner who is waiting for Channel 4 to commission Britain’s Next Top Greenhouse Builder – it’s only a matter of time, it’ll languish away on More4 for one series but it will exist

and his flower of choice for his inspiration was, well, he said it was a foxglove but you can’t deny the aubergine-ness of that gravy boat

Nick will be very flattered.

Spinning Plates

For their second challenge, the potters were being introduced to the titular Throwdown as they were challenged to make as many side plates as they possibly could in only 20 minutes with the specifications of a side plate being that they needed a mustard well because today was apparently being sponsored by Big Mustard. Although Shani is apparently leading the anti-mustard revolution because she was not going to be deigning mustard with a seat at her table

but she got points for the fact she was consistently wrong and Keith only mashed up 3 of her 11 plates. I say “it worked out for her” but she did still come joint last with Jan who was basically taking 5 dog bowls home for Hero

the whole challenge sent me into a bit of an existential spiral as I had to grapple with what a side plate actually looks like – A LOT of them ended up looking very deep and my God were there a lot to look at! Never in throwdown history have we ever seen Siobhan and Rose having to walk around the pottery flinging clay at people like Oprah Winfrey announcing someone had won a reasonably priced family car. The only other time clay is this voraciously consumed is when a swarm of wasps are building a nest – so I will be waiting on the DNA samples to confirm everyone’s humanity but for now you’re all under suspicion of being 500 wasps in a flesh suit – especially YOU DAN who somehow churned out 10 plates all of equally good quality

that is 100% swarming insect behaviour and yet it was Steven who looked most like he was about to explode into a vespine mist

Princess and Daniel were both giving Dan a run for his money in destroying the clay supply of Gladstone – making 10 and 9 respectively. Princess definitely came out better only losing 2 of hers while Daniel’s supply was decimated because they were more of a found family

and as Keith tore through the dinner plate equivalent of a university’s LGBT society, nervous giggles were having to be stifled around the room

that is very much Edward’s “I’m in danger” face given he had surveyed his own output like he was trying to destroy them all with his own psychic powers before Keith could

it turns out he needn’t have worried because only 1 of his plates was doomed to The Bucket leaving him with 9 solid-given-the-circumstances plates.

An Official Side Plate Throwdown Ranking:
1. The Waspish Suspicion of Dan
2. Always The Princess, Never The Queen
3. Edward’s ESP Test Subjects
4. Sophie’s Low Quantity, High Quality
5. Dave’s Undefinable Rims
6. Donna’s Intact Plate Family
7. Steven’s High Speed Plate Chase
8. Cadi’s Remaining 5
9. Andrew’s Deep-dish Side Plates
10. The Downfall of Daniel, Full Name Daniel
11. Jan’s Dog Bowl Collective
=. NO MUSTARD, EVER!

Roast, Roast, Roast Your _(gravy) Boat Merrily Down the Stream

Given the nerves that come with a first episode, it was quite surprising that most of the potters’ pieces stood up to the firing process, the only person who had any trouble was Shani who had a few cracks and her 6 person Gravy Frigate was potentially not going to hold all 6 people’s worth of gravy

it was quite hard to truly appreciate the absurdity of her gravy carrying colossus until it came to the judging and it had to be put beside everything else, or at least it did in theory but it turns out it was so big it couldn’t actually fit on the tray with everything else

if you don’t need a special side table to hold your gravy boat that wouldn’t lose a fight to even the most fearsome of icebergs then you’re not doing roast dinner right

What was going for Shani though was that her set was very cohesive – which did seem to be the make or break factor for Rich and Keith given the fact they were going to easily forgive things like Sophie’s daffodil relief that would probably making cutting your roast beef into an obstacle course

but I can also see why they would because her salt spitting Easter chicken was adorable and didn’t get nearly enough screentime

I love him.

Getting the raw deal in the cohesion front was unfortunately Andrew who found out that drawing the same pattern on everything works when it’s something simple and chic like Princess’s set

and much less so when your set does look like a series of things you’ve amassed over the last 8 years of Father’s Days (complimentary)

but a lot of it is really well made – the rounders ball mustard pot is so well shaped and rendered and I think his illustration had some charm – sure there were A LOT of wandering pupils but I imagine Andrew’s game nights get a bit rowdy. Remaining the star of the show and the apple of my eye was of course the abstract Wallace and Gromit villain looking Franz Klammer salt pot

it’s so silly and charming, I want him. I have to have him.

Unfortunately as adorable as infundibular Franz Klammer was, Andrew made the mistake of alluding to a dog but failing to render said dog in clay, whereas Jan had made the nation’s new favourite beagle (we call this The Snoopy Insurrection)

not all Heroes wear capes, some of them have to be constantly stopped from eating the Monopoly figurines.
I was worried at first because they’d unveiled the set without having put the lid on the mustard pot and I truly thought something had happened to my second favourite piece of clay (I still love you most of all, Franz Klammer)

but it turns out they were just finding a way to inject some peril into the episode because Rose has proved too adept at climbing the stairs and the Test Gravy had gone AWOL.

Hero wasn’t the only dog on show, he was joined by Dave’s Potentially Anatomically Incorrect Canine Undercarriage

and as we know anatomical correctness is paramount in the Throwdown, which is why Dan made sure to give all his seagulls that sexy Paul Newman stare

it’s why they call Paul Hollywood The Seagull of Bread.

And of course Cadi’s life-sized projectile gravying shih tzu

for some reason Keith didn’t sob over that particular rendering of a dog but he and Rich did very much like her acorn salt and pepper pots

and I think they were very much the high points of her set – I still love the gravy boat most of all, but Keith thought she was perhaps a bit too ambitious with trying to render something like flames in clay with her bonfire mustard pot

it does look a little bit like a chicken stuck in a medieval torture cage

I did google that to see if there was any weird Chicken Run fanart, and there is but none of it is safe for work and I need to go and get some new eyeballs. Rookie internet error on my behalf.

Dave’s set got a warmer reception for the river theme that ran through the whole thing

his plate is amazing – I just think those fish are so well executed, I would buy a whole set just decorated with them

I do wish other parts of the set maybe got the same level of attention but they are on hell of a time crunch and I did go to university in York so I am programmed to love any and every duck no matter how much of a waterborne sausage it looks like

Franz Klammer has some competition…

Dave was definitely in contention for Potter of the Week and giving him a run for his money were Donna and Dan – I would call them The D trio but… I think that’s a category on X-tube and I don’t want that traffic. Now, to segue effortlessly from that porn joke to talking about a roast dinner set inspired by Donna’s grandmother

it is very good and given the amount of illustrating she had to do she was getting some good practice in before their inevitable Slip Trailing Throwdown Challenge

Keith adored the whole set and even went so far as to say it was the best illustration he had seen in the pottery. I think for me personally, I wish there was a little more flourish in the actual pottery, I think something like Edward’s Definitely Not An Aubergine Gravy Boat with the really beautiful fluid shape and handle caught my attention a little more than a well glazed but ultimately kind of ordinary set of pieces

but hey, the classics are classics for a reason and I appreciated the sentimentality behind Donna’s set, as I did Steve’s Nan’s Cans (a dangerous sentence)

some of the illustration got away from him a little bit but those little salt and pepper pots have a perfectly captured retro nostalgia to them and I do appreciate the generous perforation he gave them

we need to accept that 3 and 5 holes are not enough, which is another X-tube category.

Lastly we have the Dan vs Daniel, Full Name Daniel showdown with Dan’s seaside set coming out absolutely perfectly

the plates do look like a pair of bespoke shuriken but the jolly seagulls at least make them look like Baby’s First Shuriken and once again Rich and Keith were turning away from any potential impracticality because the spade and the flagpole on his, very cute, salt and pepper pots are getting pile driven into a heap of roasties during their first outing

but I’m all for the fawning over his gravy boat and the lettering work on the outside

but Rich’s heart will always belong to the canoe

you won the plate war but you’ll never win the battle for Rich’s undivided attention.

Then there was Daniel and his Dim Sum set which I think was overall the best modeling work this episode – his little dumpling shakers and the steamer basket were absolute perfection

I truly think that steamer basket mustard pot was the best made piece of the week, it’s so precise and well rendered while also being playful and cute with the little chicken foot on top. The only thing letting him down was maybe the size and shape of his gravy boat which looked like it wouldn’t hold all that much gravy

But Shani’s Gravy Celeste was in dock and ready to pick up any overspill.

A Roast Dinner Set Ranking
1. JUSTICE FOR EDWARD’S GRAVY LOADED AUBERGINE
2. Dan’s Frank Sinatra Seagulls
3. MAN CAN(oe)!
4. Not All Heroes Wear Capes…
5. There’s Sim Sum-thing In The Water
6. Donna Is Slip Trailing Ahead
7. Oh, Can You Do The Nan Can?
8. Pass Me The Shih Tzu, I Want Some Gravy
9. Princess’s Closely Held Cards
10. Your Steak Knife vs a Daffodil
11. Andrew’s Game Night
12. The HMS Gravy Boat

Now for the exciting bits, with the first Potter of the Week going to Donna for her slip trailed ode to her nan (sans cans)

I can’t disagree, I think any of my top 6 could have been given the title of Potter of the Week and I would have agreed – I was slightly surprised it wasn’t given to Dan purely for the combined effort of his Throwdown Challenge and the quality of his roast dinner set but alas, sexily smizing seagulls don’t do it for Keith. Lesson learned.

As for who was going home, it was pretty much down to Shani and Andrew, I personally think we should be playing by Junior Bake Off rules where nobody goes home in the first episode because they don’t want to make 11 years cry on public television (it doesn’t work, they always do and I have to change the channel) and I’m an even stronger proponent of it because I lost MY SWEET BABY ANGEL ANDREW

how quickly the blog faves emerge and have their hopes dashed upon the jagged rocks of doom. He’ll always be *my* favourite, and you can follow him on Instagram at Andrew_Macbean_Ceramics.

And that’s it for Week 1! and we’re down to 11 potters!

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