Jay Blades is back with a new series, The Repair Shop: Fixing Britain, and the furniture restorer knows a thing or two about fixing things – including himself.

A tatty wooden rocking horse is the first patient in The Repair Shop: Fixing Britain. Dating from the 60s, when owner Julie was a toddler, the once stately beast had been ridden to ruin, then given a clumsy paint job – complete with creepy eyes – in the late 80s. “My son never liked it,” says Julie ruefully. “He just found it scary.”

The show’s master craftspeople take charge, and it’s not long before the newly-mended, smartly-saddled steed is revealed in all its dappled splendour. “It was such a transformation,” says presenter Jay Blades. “It looked absolutely amazing, and that’s going to last for another 100 years within that family.”

The Repair Shop: Fixing Britain is, of course, a spin-off of The Repair Shop, the emotion-filled before-and-after show that captivated so many viewers with its gentle warmth that it transferred from BBC Two to peak-time BBC One, and regularly attracts an audience of 6.5 million.

As ever, the experts are busy mending family treasures, be it a mangled music box or a battered barber’s shop pole. But in this series Jay digs deeper into the history behind the items, discovering their connection to everything from childhood and rural life to espionage and immigration.

“It’s a really beautiful show,” says the 50-year-old. “When you repair the items, you understand their history to that person, but there’s a bigger history that’s then linked to Britain, and it blew me away. It made me fall in love with The Repair Shop all over again.”

For Jay, who also presents Money for Nothing – which sees a team of artisans upcycling items from the tip – breathing new life into pre-loved pieces is both practical and joyful.

“We are part of this consumerist society now, where it’s easier to buy something new rather than repair items,” he says. “People are very eager to buy new, because it gives you that feelgood factor. But if you repaired something and looked after it, it could become a family heirloom.”

Jay has a long history of turning tat into treasure, but his very first fix wasn’t exactly heirloom material. Aged eight, he found an old bike frame in a bin near his home in Hackney, East London, and gradually rebuilt it.

“On my council estate there were people fixing things anyway, and they would tell you where to get a wheel, or how to fix a chain,” he recalls. “I don’t think it had brakes, but I used to ride it around feeling so chuffed because I made this bike! Kids don’t do things like that now.”

Yet although he was good with his hands, Jay struggled at school. He left at 15 and became a building labourer, and it wasn’t until he went to university aged 31 that he discovered what the problem was: dyslexia.

“They said I’d got the reading ability of an 11-year-old,” he says. “It made sense, because when I was at secondary school I started believing the words the teachers called me – I was dumb, I was stupid, and I wasn’t going to amount to anything – and I’d just switched off.”

Determined to make a difference, Jay set up a charity, Out of the Dark, which showed young people how to restore furniture. “I wanted the ones like me, from the poor side of town and not academic, to see that they can do something different. You can be good with your hands, you can make something, you can achieve something.”

Five years ago life took a bleak turn for the father-of-one. The charity lost its funding and folded, his marriage ended and, living out of his car, he harboured suicidal thoughts. “I was in an unbelievably bad place,” he says. “I was in a place where some people don’t come back from.”

Thankfully a friend came to his rescue: “He took me under his wing and just looked after me. I felt naked, I felt so exposed, but every day it was like I was putting some clothes back on, and it kind of rebuilt me. And then Money for Nothing got in contact.”

Jay had first met the Money for Nothing team before his breakdown, when they’d spotted him in a video about Out of the Dark. He was signed up as an artisan for two series, and then promoted to presenter. Today he’s a household name and TV regular, and couldn’t be happier than when he’s transforming something shabby into something chic.

“Every time I fix an item I feel a sense of achievement,” he says, “and those comments from the negative teachers disappear slightly further from my shoulders.”

::The Repair Shop: Fixing Britain, BBC One, weekdays, 4:30pm

An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in July 2020 (c) Waitrose