Game of Wool should have been a slam dunk for Channel 4. Presented by Tom Daley and placed in a primetime slot, it was primed to scratch that same itch as other hobby competition shows like Bake Off, Sewing Bee and Pottery Throwdown. It has a ready-made audience: a passionate community of knitters and crocheters in the UK has ballooned in recent years, as the internet and social media made picking up a pair of needles easier than ever.
But as an ardent knitter and lurker in knitting and crochet forums, I’ve seen a community response that ranges from unimpressed to almost vitriolically negative. And I know why.
The core problem is not with the contestants, judges, or the presenter – who are all passionate and charming people. It’s not even the confusion around crochet and knitting. It’s the weekly challenges – they are perplexing, ill thought out and, often, bad TV.
Why have contestants make swimwear, let alone glam swimwear, that is impossible to wear in water? Why have them attempt to cover a sofa in aggressively chunky yarn as a team, and then criticise the team that managed to pull it off in the time as being too safe or boring? Why ask them to make Fair Isle sweater vests when they really meant stranded colourwork? (This seemingly small detail in the first episode outraged Shetland Islanders in particular, leading to open letters to the show).
In any other hobby competition series, contestants will be asked to design things whole cloth, whether it’s their riff on a cake or a garment for a specific event. Game of Wool does this too, but the scale of the designs is ridiculous.
Design tasks that push contestants to their limits and ask for things far beyond what you might make at home are great in small doses. The creativity they inspire and the final results can be a delight. The amigurumi challenge in which the knitters had to make realistic plates of their favourite food (though real heads will note that the fact they were asked not to add on cutesy eyes means they’re not really amigurumi) really showed their strengths and weaknesses, and I loved the challenge which asked them to create a kid’s costume – a design playground anyone who makes clothes will be familiar with.
But none of the design tasks has fallen into the remit of what someone could actually want to make, which is why you can see the strain on the contestants’ faces. Watching home makers design connected but unique cushion covers, or the most glamorous beach cover ups, or a crochet parasol (all of which are items you could actually use these crafts for but give you endless scope for creativity) would be far more gratifying. Then you intersperse the more outrageous to really push them.
They’ve been asked for spectacle in a medium that cannot do that at scale and in such infeasibly short time periods. Timed knitting challenges can absolutely play a part – but you have to be realistic. The timing in Bake Off doesn’t allow for mistakes or redos, sure, but it isn’t nearly impossible to achieve the end bake. Not so on Game of Wool, a fact the show itself seems to take pride in.
There are the smaller questions that need to be answered too. The promotion of Game of Wool is almost entirely centred around knitting, yet the contestants are spending as much time crocheting. These are distinct skills and conflating them is a quick way to p*ss off people who specialise in either.
And in the first episode, there was also the previously mentioned clumsiness around Fair Isle, where Shetland Islanders point out the show was littered with errors about their historic craft and misled viewers about the heritage art form (this is a mistake I also made in my own review). These are both errors, but ones that can be learned from.
More egregious is the fact that the show fails to celebrate technique – specifically the ability to recreate, replicate or follow specific instructions. This is fundamental to all hobbies – creation is learned through recreational re-creation (sorry). It is also, frankly, what makes it so fun and satisfying. It is thrilling to follow a pattern exactly or to puzzle out how something is made and do it yourself.
Only two out of 12 challenges on Game of Wool have explicitly explored that skill: last week’s lace challenge and the 80s jumper task in week two. Both were far more exciting to watch and fun for the contestants. Isaac’s impeccable lace as a first timer? That’s good TV. It also, incidentally, served as a justification for the team challenge being judged blind – a factor that otherwise hasn’t actually mattered.
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The fun of knitting and crochet is not all design, and it’s not all re-creation. These are skills that feed into each other, and what people love about knitting and crochet – you can do both or bounce between the two. But Channel 4’s competition makes it seem as though knitters/crocheters just create ideas out of nowhere, risk developing RSI to finish them and are often disappointed in the result.
It is no fun for anyone. If Game of Wool wants to succeed, it needs the knitting and crochet communities on board – not just bitching about it on subreddits.
‘Game of Wool’ continues on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm
