Hackney-born television presenter Jay Blades has been awarded a BAFTA, in a moment he hailed as the “first time” someone from his background had been presented with an award for daytime TV.
The daytime BAFTA award went to The Repair Shop at the ceremony yesterday evening (May 14).
Accepting the award, Blades claimed that it was a “first ” for a “6ft black guy, from Hackney, [with a] gold tooth, [from a] single parent [family]”.
The Repair Shop received the gong for a one-off special in which the repair team, including Jay Blades, visited King Charles at Dumfries House in Scotland for The Repair Shop: A Royal Visit.
Arriving on stage to collect the award, Blades said: “Wow, just give me two seconds, I have to take a picture, it’s quite special.
“We started as a daytime show on BBC Two, I’m so glad we’ve got an [award].”
During the show’s episode, Charles saw a bracket clock and a piece made for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee by British ceramics maker Wemyss Ware fixed, and also joked and laughed with Blades.
It also featured Blades, who attended the King’s Coronation, touching Charles’s arm and him returning the gesture by placing a hand on his back.
Last year, the furniture restorer recalled how his school and teenage years in Hackney were challenging as he experienced racist bullying and being put in the back of police van and “beaten up” during the period of stop and search.
He said at the time: “The Repair Shop has fixed me because what it’s done is actually brought me into another family, that’s people in front and behind the camera, who have looked after me and understand my kind of, I’ll call them differences, and just accepted them.”
Blades added from the BAFTA red carpet last night that The Repair Shop has a “simple message, but a big message”.
He said: “It’s all about community – there’s a community of us at The Repair Shop and then we’re helping people that we don’t know, so what you’re doing there is you’re actually showing humanity. That’s what the show’s all about.”
Some reporting by PA.
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