Somehow this show has more tension than anything Tom Daley knits.

We have to save Holger.

Tanks For Nothing

It’s finally here. And I can’t possibly imagine why this hostage situation on the Shetland Islands has been in post-production limbo for so long… And with the unfolding revelations about the contracts these knitters signed and the fact they’ve apparently surrendered creative control of the patterns THEY DESIGNED to Rowan to sell in the form of a £100 kit (and allegedly not see any of the returns)

you can’t help but feel we’re just watching a knitting battery farm with the losing knitters being made into pies because they failed to lay any eggs for The Mmes. Tweedy

and in this Chicken Run analogy, Tom Daley is the husband who is sure the knitters are plotting against them

and rest assured, THEY ARE – I’ve never seen one of these hobby-based competition series nosedive towards a mutiny this quickly – and who can blame them, 12 hours to knit a fair isle tank top?

which of course brings us to the main cast of battery hens knitters. You’ve got Stephanie as the eternally positive Babs who hasn’t realised this is a hostage situation and still thinks they’re all on holiday

and everyone else is Babs knitting herself a noose

but nobody was having a worse time than Holger who was having to debase himself by touching *clutches pearls* chunky yarn!

he fully signed up to this expecting them to give him a reasonable 40 hours to knit a fashionable tank top but these HEATHENS will only give him 12 hours and a pair of baguettes masquerading as knitting needles

How dare you not give this former Savile Row tailor the time to do his Italian bind offs!

he wants to make sensible things very sensibly but this show is going to funnel feed this sensible german misery guts whimsy like he’s a foie gras goose

I am so excited to see him having to knit a small hat for a whippet – I think it might be enough to make him walk into the sea

his emotional support chicken is going to be working overtime

and when Holger is done processing the trauma of non-consensual chunky knitting, can he give it to Gordon to hug

it’s… punk? I mean, it’s basically the Versace safety pin dress for a west country farmer instead of Elizabeth Hurley

Gordon was attempting the steeking method of just cutting out the armholes. Unfortunately, it’s not a method best suited to chunky yarn – a fact we mostly gleaned through everyone very loudly talking about it on the sofa-with-no-back-support while Gordon was very much in earshot

I know this show is essentially Tom Daley’s Knitted Bake Off, but really it’s more akin to Interior Design Masters in that it is not a show that *needs* interpersonal drama or a ~villain~ but it is a perfect storm of highly volatile hobby wankery (I’VE SEEN THE RAVELRY FORUMS), socially awkward strangers and impossible to surmount team challenges that have the exact same tension as a feminist book club with very different opinions on the novels of Jane Austen. I give it three episodes before nerves are unravelling faster than Gordon’s tank top and everyone has to sit down for a therapy session with Tracy before knitting needles get weaponised

I’m kind of obsessed with the insane neckline she did, and it looks even more like Christmas by way of your aunt going to Cancun when Tom Daley puts it on

nothing is funnier to me than how palpably obvious it is that the decision to have Tom model the tank tops was a very last minute decision because none of them fit him correctly BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T GIVEN A MEASUREMENT

but they really needed to get a bunch of shots of his slutty little waist as he took tank tops on and off ~for the plot~

and some of these were definitely designed with a woman in her mid-40s in mind

But I do enjoy knitted cross dressing

Ailsa very much feels like the chosen winner of the series – she’s a Scottish native and even works for the Shetland ferry-service, and thus is possibly Holger’s best means of escape

her design was VERY good though. The dogs and the tie neck? Adorable! But the part of it that got Sheila and Di all worked up was the porthole on the back

OH, SO NOW YOU LIKE A HOLE?

Stephanie had also gone for a more advanced neckline, opting for a roll neck that went down very well

my personal favourite #tank top was probably Isaac’s, not for any originality, but I am just a sucker for a silly goose

the tank tops were meant to have some sort of personal symbolism – some leaned more into it than others. Holger’s was just “this a standard fair isle knit because I am sensible and standard, I will not kowtow to the your flights of fancy”

and then you have Simon, knitting egg timers and petri dishes into a tank top as a nod to the IVF treatment he and his wife are going through to conceive

I think he had the best grasp of the challenge – this feels bespoke and personal whereas most of the other motifs felt like things you could go and find on a Pinterest inspiration board in 2 minutes. I did also really like Lydia’s approach of making a fair isle inspired by Ghanaian kente cloth

the judges also really loved it, deeming it “runway ready” and I think it did stand out amongst the more traditional pieces. Which was also the main thing going for Meadow who’s tank top looked like something you could buy on Cider

I love most of this – that massive puke green band around the middle probably needs to be a different green. It’s not the right shade of green to really make that pink pop but I can still see someone showing up wearing it on University Challenge, the London Fashion Week of questionably amazing knitwear.

Putting the “Ouch!” in Couch

And this is where the show drives itself straight off a cliff, with the final challenge of the episode being a team challenge to create a fully fitted couch cover for a not *small* couch either

the show very much assumed that teams of 5 would be enough to cover it in only 10 hours. It was very much not enough time – with the only completed sofa of the two being criticised for not having enough of a concept behind it because it was just a textured gradient

as you can probably guess the lack of high conceptual nonsense is because Holger saw the impending disaster if he allowed Stephanie to reach for the marker pens first and start doodling an idea for a sofa that looks like Garfield

however, his sensible pragmatism couldn’t save him from being forced to do chunky knit again because truly it was the only hope they had of ever finishing this task

I don’t know why we went straight to sofas? I mean, obviously better to do it while you still had a full cohort than in the middle of the series when half of them #have built a makeshift raft to escape the island

but a cover for a smaller piece of furniture – a pouffe or even an armchair – would’ve seemed more achievable and maybe encouraged both teams to embrace a design aesthetic instead of just prioritising getting the damn thing covered while (slightly too smuggly, Ailsa) watching the other team dig their own high concept knitted grave

while Holger’s Sensible Cable Knit Sweatshop ploughed their way through the challenge, the other team hamstrung themselves with a holiday concept lead by Isaac very ill-advisedly assuming he could knit an entire ombre sunset backsplash in just 10 hours

and obviously having barely finished a twunk-sized tank top in 12 hours, there was no way in hell that this sofa-length intarsia sunset was happening in just 10 – Dipti very much being the Cassandra that nobody would listen to

Dipti is a self-proclaimed knitting novice and this show is very much not geared towards accommodating that. Truly I don’t know who this show is trying to gear itself for – it’s hardly encouraging to new knitters because everyone is complaining about how impossible the challenges are at any given moment and it’s just infuriating for experienced knitters to see people having their creativity and talent scuppered with unrealistic expectations and constraints. Much like the fabled Nail Art version of Glow Up that’s been whispered about for a few years, I don’t know if knitting is suited to a competition series. There’s only so much televisual interest to be derived from people getting severe repetitive strain injuries. And in order to balance a lack of ~action~, you at least need to create a fun, cosy vibe but this godforsaken team challenge ended like Homer and Marge Simpsons going through their umpteenth marriage crisis

it’s a good thing that next week they’re having the emergency emotional support whippet flown in

and Isaac and his team can hopefully work through the trauma of this couch that looks like one of the less successful cakes on “Nailed It!”

the stunned silence of Di and Sheila as they gazed upon this primordial slop of a couch is EVERYTHING to me

I would say it was the weirdest piece of furniture I’ve ever seen but I can’t even say it’s the weirdest piece of furniture I’ve seen all week because over on Drag Race, we had “What if Cher was a Chair?”

and yet, somehow the best performance on this week’s Snatch Game.

My particular highlight of the Sofa though, is the balls of wool just jammed onto the feet like a toddler wearing their mum’s high heels

that’s the point you realise you’ve strayed too far from God’s light and need to go back to the drawing board. So I hope something, ANYTHING, changes between this obvious test pilot of an episode and episode 2. Even if it’s just the title of “Big Knitter”

It is a spoonerism away from being a cancellable offense. And much like the title of the show, I’m trying to work out if there’s a pun there? But also, I can’t help but keep whispering “Big Knitter?” in the same voice as Jujubee recounting the story of Trixie Mattel going on stage to the full album cut of Supermodel by RuPaul

but this week’s Big Knitter was Ailsa

I promise you, “Knitter of the Week” is fine, guys. Just say that, PLEASE. The elimination being dubbed as “cast off” works much better. Unfortunately, Holger’s prayers for oblivion fell on deaf ears and it was Gordon who gets to go home and experience joy again

you knew this was happening when he began having his Tragedy Mirror moment and talking about the drive-by hate crime he’d experienced for knitting in public on a cruise ship

Ma’am, I have a few things to tell you about the average jigsaw enjoyer.

I know I’ve been harsh on the show and I just want to stress, I fully believe the issues with it are entirely on production. Far too much of the heavy lifting of the show is being put on the shoulders of the knitters who are all wonderful people who I appreciate and admire immensely for putting themselves out there in such a public-facing way. But they aren’t media trained or experienced TV personalities – they’re a bunch of very nervous guinea pigs who clearly signed up for Knitting Throwdown and got this entirely different animal. This felt like a test pilot that shouldn’t have made it to air and I can only hope that they scale back the challenges a fraction to better facilitate both success and some sense of joy for the knitters.