Ophelia (John Everett Millais, 1851–1852. Oil on canvas.)

What *is* a circle?

Not A Soaking Clock

As the clock strikes 12 on our full house of potters, Keith and Rich set the task for them to slab build a mantlepiece clock consisting of three distinct sections: a base, a main body and a lid. The main risk of this particular build of course being the shrinkage of clay and trying to get the clockface to be a snug fit post-firing. So you could take great care to calculate for the 9% shrinkage-rate of clay like Chris

or, make like Imy and just have the vaguest guess at what a circle looks like

“It doesn’t matter that it’s slightly asymmetrical” is perhaps the bravest thing anyone on this show has ever said. Imy had made things much more difficult for herself by going for a cylindrical clock body for her African Hut Clock inspired by her time spent on a school trip to Amorphous Africa™ where she met and bonded with a deaf girl in the village she was staying in

I’m not sure how much of an Amorphously African Vibe this gives me because it does remind me more of the Wizard’s Tower in Stardew Valley

who sadly cannot be the loved one that the pieces had to be inspired by BECAUSE FOR SOME REASON THE WIZARD IS NOT A ROMANCEABLE CHARACTER. LET ME SMOOCH THE MAGIC MAN! There’s only so many times I can play Stardew Valley and always default to I Can Fix Him Through The Medium of Chickens with Shane…

^{this week’s call for engagement: who is your Stardew Valley romance option?
And if you don’t play Stardew Valley, just guess. Stab in the dark. Make it up.}

there’s a reason I am chronically single, which none of the potters are because they all seem to be trapped in decade long engagements

James, hot off a first episode win, was taking us to Paris with his Montmartre clock inspired by his proposal to his fiancé 10 years ago

Ah yes, the struggle between the urge to cheer every time a potter procalims their queerness and the resistance to be happy for two beautiful people. Inside of you are two gay wolves.

Paris was a very popular theme for the potters with Jonathan, doing his best Geography teacher cosplay

taking us on an educational year 9 school trip to Paris the likes of which Heartstopper did a terrible job of catching the reality of – it’s not a school trip until an entire friend group has stopped talking to each other before you get off the coach and you’ve accidentally called your French teacher “mum”

as well as throwing every Parisian stereotype at his clock like someone trying to infiltrate the Café René it was largely inspired by a cycling trip he’d done with his daughter

the structural integrity of his Eiffel Tower inspired base was a real risk but Keith was more worried about The Anatomy of a Can Can Skirt

if you told me to guess Natalie’s previous job before becoming The Supreme Aquacise Instructor of the United Kingdom (a title I alone have decided to give her) I think I would have been able to guess Dancer at the Moulin Rouge within the first 5 tries

it’s the only logical explanation for these kicks

break out the Gnathodynamometer, because I’m convinced Natalie’s legs have the same bite force as a saltwater crocodile

SNAP!

With the inspiration being loved ones, we did of course end up with a couple of In Memoriam Clocks which completely neuters my recapping capabilities. Your dead relatives are to me as Kryptonite is to Superman. The first being for Victor’s Schnauzer and Extremely Good Boy, Tobie

and the second being for Olivia’s Nan

it’s very much an abstract approach to familial grief, with Eldritch Kirby being symbolic of familial disconnection

Sure! Why not?
Olivia did have a little bit of a sizing issue with her pieces fitting together

for which Imy was summoned to help remedy

she wouldn’t have been my personal first choice of emergency surgical advisor given her own approach to geometric clarity

if you need help with rectangular surgery, surely The Straightest Man Alive™ is your first port of call

I had to go and make sure that Chris wasn’t part of an episode of Don’t Tell The Bride – as far as I know, he wasn’t and he and his wife were both consenting to the the historical accuracy of parachuting into the medieval castle wedding. William the Conqueror could NEVER

and on the other end of the fairytale building spectrum, we have Diana with her idyllic smallholding cottage that looks a bit like a wolf might try to huff and puff and blow it down

and he better do it quickly because Diana’s husband appears to be raising a sounder of attack pigs

there’s a Bay of Pigs joke in here somewhere which I’ll just lay down in front of you like a cheeseboard and let you build it yourself. Fidel Castro is the water biscuits.

Stephen was very much of the approach of trying to have the most unique hobby with his love of Organised Treasure Hunting (remember kids: Unorganised Treasure Hunting is ✨Piracy✨) on which he may have once won a car?

or at least a hubcap?

or a JCB?

anecdote unclear. Either way, he insists that the loved one in this narratively confusing clock was Unnamed Woman From The VT and not whichever pieces of an automobile he dug up in that field were

he did get a little hole-happy and his clock ended up being double penetrated

I know someone who could borrow a spare circle

I’M SORRY IMY, I JUST CAN’T GET OVER IT.

However I think Stephen’s dedication to being a Lawful Good Calico Jack may have been outdone by Hayley proudly showing off her favourite piece of a whale spine that she just has lying around in her garden

sadly her clock was not a skeletal zombie whale but instead a celebration of the 1999 Solar Eclipse which I am definitely choosing to believe Hayley spent celebrating naked on the beach as part of a Pagan religious ceremony fueled mostly by homegrown organic psychedelics. I did enjoy the two birds on the clock just being described as “two birds” when they are quite clearly choughs

but Pottery Throwdown now airs at 19:45 on a Sunday evening and homophonous Chuffs are on the “?????? List” of pre-watershed utterings and we were already toeing a line with all the clock talk

It took Springwatch like 10 years before they even tried talking about choughs and beavers.

Francesca was creating a Christmas-themed clock inspired by the time she introduced her husband to her parents at Christmas and he cooked three chickens because There’s No Such Thing As A Fish Turkeys In India

it’s a smart choice because if it doesn’t come out very well, you only have to have it out for 1 month of the year. You best believe every single one of my creations on this show would be themed around a holiday for this exact reason, culminating in an Arbor Day bidet that gets me kicked out. I’m still manifesting the Bathroom Week Bidet Challenge.

And lastly we have Steve’s clock inspired by a hike he went on with his partner who is definitely the important figure in this story and not the afterthought to his two dogs

the dogs aren’t the only ones sleeping in the dog house tonight, sir.

A Candlestick-y Situation

In a continuation of what I think may have been Mantlepiece Week, for their Throwdown Challenge the potters were having to make three identical candlestick holders

which sounds easy but this was the Obligatory Blindfold Episode

it takes quite a suspension of disbelief to accept that Natalie, former Moulin Rouge dancer and current dictator of a community swimming pool, doesn’t know her way around a blindfold. There is however no disbelief in this being Chris’s critique

Chris is actually three rulers in a trench coat which unfortunately wasn’t much help in this challenge as he came 10th, managing to only beat Olivia and Jonathan. The latter of which is bringing back The Witch Trials

and once he’s done with Keith, it’s Diana’s turn to be weighed against a duck

BURN THE WITCH!

Joining Diana on the podium were Steve and Fran – who had two very different blindfolded experiences. Steve had a great time

meanwhile Fran was having her very own A Quiet Place experience as she jumped out of her skin every time Siobhan gave a time call or tried to talk to her

Why did Emily Blunt never just try to scare the Death Angels? A simple “Boo!” could have saved so many lives.

An Official Blind-built Candlestick Ranking:
1. Diana, The New Supreme Arisen
2. Daredevil Steve
3. Fran, The Final Girl of Gladstone
4. Victor’s Average Friday Night
5. Natalie’s Blindfold Familiarity
6. Imy’s Down 2 Senses, Give Her A Break!
7. Stephen’s Usually Just Wears An Eyepatch
8. James’s Heady Candlesticks
9. Hayley Does A Lot In The Dark
10. Chris Being Straight To The Bitter End
11. Olivia’s No Good, Very Bad Week in The Pottery
12. Jonathan, The Witch Hunter General

Clocking Out

Upon their clocks being pulled out of the kiln, there were a few potters that were having to deal with some technical issues. While everyone had spent the night fretting about their clocks exploding, Chris came back to a clock that had suffered from gravitational collapse and was now just two pieces

Chris’s accidental experimentation in black hole cosmology was not where his woes would end as his carefully calculated hole gaped around his clock

which was a shame because I really liked his clock (the amount of very careful proofreading I had to do for this particular recap, MY GOD.)

Chris was FAR from the only one with clock hole issues as we finally get the pay off to Imy’s prayers that the kiln would magically be able to correct her vague gesture at understanding what a circle is

as it turns out, the Kiln Gods did not in fact go to school for maths

but there were still quite a few strengths to Imy’s piece as after being praised for her ability to draw using glazes, she’d decided to do it again, this time decorating her hut with a giraffe that appears to be giving us bedroom eyes

I will be bringing this up with my therapist this week

Stephen was the only one dealing with a crack but it didn’t seem that much of an issue in the end with his clock surviving its second glazing and the only issue in the end was the fact his lid had distorted so it rocked slightly

STEPHEN, lie and say it’s meant to be like that to replicate the ticking of a clock and give the boxing hares more motion! Keith would eat that up! But he instead hoped the kiln would perform a miracle

I need to know what has lead him and Imy to believe that the kiln is housing a Genie of Geometry that can grant them three wishes. The kiln didn’t fix the issues but he ended up with a really lovely clock despite it all – especially the hares which have a lot of charm to them

Stephen wasn’t the only one with fit issues as Olivia found herself being clockblocked by a ceramic leaf of her own design

and then adding salt to her fit issue wounds was the fact her body wouldn’t fit on the base

somebody revoke Imy’s surgical advisory license IMMEDIATELY before she and her boyfriend open the most perilous chiropractors you’ve ever seen

The rest of the potters all had no problems with the insertion of their clocks – however Victor was so worried about how well his clock would fit that he’d come with a potential alternate use for the clock case

he could at least be confident that a hamster would fit because the clockhole is a generous 4 Richard Geres wide, the official unit of measurement of Hamster Circumference. However this particular hole would go unexplored by hamsterkind as the clock fit perfectly and the whole thing looked really cute

it has the same vibe as those really kitschy cat clocks with the ticking tail and eyes that look cute but are so loud you can feel the seconds being shaved off your lifetime with every tick of its tail. Nobody managed to create a clock quite that cursed, however Hayley’s does have a certain occult charm to it – I wish we’d got a better full view of it, they never really filmed it as one piece by my god did we know the figurines were double cheeked up on a thursday afternoon

I do think Hayley’s was easily one of my favourites – the design of it just works so well. The clock fits in with the rest of the design without just looking a bit like you shoved a clock into the sort of mantlepiece ornament from 1981 that only ever seems to turn up in an Age UK charity shop being sold for £3.99 [tone indicator: complimentary in the case of Diana’s really quaint little cottage]

is it a little twee? Yes. But I love the amount of small pieces – I’m a sucker for tiny little pottery animals like Rich apparently is for a fondleable chimney

which is also what I really loved about Francesca’s – the little cat is absolutely darling

I can’t say I personally *loved* the rest of the clock but I think that’s more because it’s such a specific and personal reference which I do like because it feels like Francesca made this for herself rather than trying to please the judges

and the Shrine to Roast Chickens Past is certainly a conversation starter

it does rely on your friendship group being the sort of people that stand by the mantlepiece swirling snifters of whiskey while plotting the demise of a business rival but I don’t know what Francesca does in her spare time. Corporate espionage can be a hobby.

And before we get to the Parisian Trio, we’ll take a hike with Steve whose clock was absolute perfection – the colour scheme and the way he did the clouds is just so pretty

it was pretty clear he was getting the win this episode, but James was hot on his heels for a seconds win in a row but ultimately I think James’s was too similar to his previous make

it’s really well made, but it’s really well made in exactly the same way last week’s sheep salad set was: incredible linework and glazing work but ultimately quite simplistic in terms of the build. Which isn’t a bad thing, I like that he has a distinct artistic point of view, I just think this time it comes across as slightly more commercial than bespoke. Which speaks to James’s actual abilities because I could be easily convinced that everything he’s made so far was churned out by a machine.

My favourite of the Paris-themed clocks was easily Natalie’s Moulin Rouge clock which could have easily ended up looking like a burlesque massacre when she started stippling and splattering on all the red glaze but thankfully she kept it from ending up as Can Can Carnage

I love this! It tickles the same part of my brain that thought the highest form of art was the placemats at this pizza place in Harare that I used to go to when I was a child called St. Elmo’s (the pizza place was called St. Elmo’s, my deadname is not St. Elmo’s… OR IS IT?)

I screamed in Costa when I actually managed to hunt down a picture of THE placemats. It’s so important to preserve culture, like Jonathan forever immortalising his daughter washing her hair on his clock

why? We’ll never know. There were lots of parts of various clocks that went unexplored – I’d like to have seen more of what Chris had written on his clock

and we didn’t get a particularly clear view of Toby tasting the rainbow on Victor’s clock either

WHY ARE YOU HIDING TOBIE’S ALLYSHIP? If the potters have gone to the lengths to create a fully 3D piece of art, it would be be nice to see the whole thing, babe. RELEASE THE FISH CUT!

it’s endlessly frustrating.

But back to Jonathan whose clock was a brilliant feat of well engineered pottery with the Eiffel Tower inspired base managing to survive the firing and be structurally sound enough to support the rather bulky body

he’s managed to capture the very specific aesthetic of sporting memorabilia that suits the overall cycling theme of the clock extremely well. It looks like The Tour de France did a brand deal with Royal Dansk to make a novelty biscuit tin. So you could use it as both a clock and storage for your sewing supplies when you hit your 60s and develop the unquenchably psychotic urge to constantly disappoint your grandchildren with the promise of phantom biscuits. I don’t think Royal Dansk biscuits actually exist, it’s entirely a sham created by Big Grandma

WHERE ARE THE BUTTER COOKIES, SHIRLEY? WHERE ARE THEY?

An Unofficial Mantlepiece Clock Ranking:
1. Steve’s Dogs. AND HIS WIFE TOO!
2. Natalie by Threat of Legs
3. Hayley’s Mooning Moon Worshippers
4. Diana’s Attack Pig Barracks
5. James’s Giftshop Clock
6. Victor’s Ceramic Hamster Mansion
7. The Chickens of ’23
8. Jonathan’s French Geography Lesson
9. Stephen’s Rocking Hares
10. Straight to the Dungeon!
11. Olivia’s High Concept Ditto
12. Stupid Sexy Giraffe

With Steve having just missed out on the top spot last week, i was thrilled to see him getting Potter of the Week this week

and with nobody having gone last week, we did end up getting the double elimination as time was called on Chris who had Wife Guy’d too close to the sun

and Olivia who got sent home in some real real ITV Crime Drama lighting

Kind of a serve, honestly.

Imy sold her concept of a circle to the devil to survive this.

And so, it’s 10 Potters O’clock for Bible Week, apparently.