James May's Shed Load of Ideas (2025) s01e06 Episode Script
Noisy Neighbours
1
JAMES: Hello.
These days, I spend more and more time in my Wiltshire home
and the pub I own,
thinking about all the big problems in the world
and some smaller ones that annoy me.
Luckily, there's a place I can go to solve them all,
or at least try
my shed.
Right.
It's here that I have the tools
Let's just saw some wood up.
the tea Mm.
and a couple of other highly-competent blokes.
Very good. Brace yourself.
who've agreed to help me rid the world of problems
Is she getting a ticket out?
Dirty fly tippers. and small.
The cereal has gone soggy.
I'll also have to take on other people's problems.
He used to make a sound, now he doesn't.
By which I mean the locals at my pub,
who are always bringing me stuff to mend.
Is it a train set?
So join us and our excitable crew.
We will capture our endeavours
That was epic.
as we create
make That feels like a terrible thing we've just done.
repair So it's never worked.
Not in my lifetime.
Wow! in my Shed Load Of Ideas.
What do you think? This is just brilliant.
The Wiltshire countryside can be wonderfully peaceful,
but like the rest of the UK, it can also sometimes be very noisy.
A noise complaint is made every 70 seconds in the UK.
And even here, we're not immune
to annoying noises from our neighbours.
Oh, no, sound like a right barney.
Let's go somewhere else.
It's a domestic.
Oh, drilling.
Nobody ever says, 'Why don't we soundproof Britain?'
In fact, you don't need to soundproof the whole house.
You just need just, like, a small room.
If you want to play the trumpet or have an argument or something,
you go into the room that's soundproof,
and then it doesn't bother your neighbours.
Actually, that's not a bad idea, is it?
Could we make a soundproof box?
The World Health Organisation says noise pollution is a major concern,
so this is a serious problem.
Let's see if we can help neighbourly relations everywhere
by making a soundproof box or room
that will keep annoying noises contained within it.
First things first, Tony the Tool is going to help me investigate
the best sound absorbing materials.
MAN: Okay. Is everyone happy? Action.
Tony has made a very simple rig
in order to test the sound-absorbing qualities
of various items that you would find around a typical household.
This is a box.
In the top of the box goes the decibel-o-meter
through that convenient little hole.
In the middle is a shelf on which we put our materials.
And in the bottom there is a Bluetooth speaker,
which will play a sound from this phone.
Obviously, some sound will be transmitted through the box.
We realise that. What we're looking for
is the difference between these materials.
This will give us some idea of how we can make our soundproof box.
There's a door, and it is sealed with a clamp.
All we need now is a suitable sound.
So I thought if you could give a blood curdling,
murderous scream, Tony, we could use that.
Yep.
That was excellent.
Right, So to begin with, if we turn on the decibel-o-metre
and put his little, it's like the family stone, head on.
Right, that's holding max.
So the maximum reading will remain frozen on the screen.
So let's try it first with nothing.
So you shut Tony's carefully-engineered box
with this beautiful piano hinge
that you see typically on Chippendale furniture.
There is the door shut.
Okay, so this is controlled. Quiet, please.
107.7 is the reading on the decibel-o-metre
with nothing in the box.
Now remember that decibels are a logarithmic scale,
which means an increase of three is double the noise,
as far as your ear is concerned.
Let's begin with Let's go through what we've got.
We have a typical pillow, some furniture moving blankets,
some egg boxes, a breakfast cereal.
We're not allowed to say which one it is.
It's very popular. It's also very snapular and crackular.
And builder's sand.
Which would you like to go with first?
Shall we go with Let's go with egg boxes.
Normally they half them, don't they, and have that bit sicking out.
I think, yeah.
People do stick egg boxes up in things like
their home-recording studios and home cinemas, don't they?
Quiet, everybody, please.
101.5. Interesting.
102 dead.
Then a furniture blanket.
88.2.
Excellent performance from the blanket.
The popular breakfast cereal,
which we happened to have in the kitchen was my idea
because I feel they will move about and absorb sound.
They will also deform very slightly, and they are full of air.
That's not particularly tremendous reasoning,
but this is an experiment, remember.
Very disappointing from the breakfast cereal.
That's higher than the control.
No.
It is noisy cereal, though.
It's 108.6.
And finally, we tried builder's sand.
Oh, no. That is disappointing.
It's better than the egg boxes, though.
Very slightly better than the egg box.
The conclusion is that
our soundproof room within a room
Blankets. blankets.
88.2.
Right. Onwards.
So after buying a shedload of blankets
and picking up Simmy, we three return to the workshop
to begin making our soundproof room in a room,
which will be a supersized version of Tony's soundproof box.
Say when.
First, we demonstrate the result of our noise research
Here's one more. Brace yourself.
which looks like workplace bullying.
It's definitely getting quieter. Maybe a little scream.
Right. Okay.
What we decided, viewers, was that the best sound-deadening material
of those things that you might have around the house
is the removal blanket.
Now, here we have a pile of 150 of them.
There's going to be a frame,
Yeah.
And the blanket walls will also be filled with blankets.
SIM: Yes, let's do that.
If this works, people could take our prototype concept
What you're seeing here, viewers,
is the basic element of mass production.
and turn a room in their own house into a soundproof room.
Nicely done.
We're constructing a very simple wooden cube,
but crucially, we're leaving a small cavity
between the inside and outside walls.
There can't be any physical connection,
or as little as possible between the inner and outer wall
because the dense wood would transfer the sound.
So you've got to avoid that.
You've got to keep the gap all the way around.
Then we fill it up with sound-deadening material,
which is blankets.
If you hadn't worked it out already, viewers,
you can now see what this is going to look like.
There it is.
Okay, so now we're going to curtain the inside.
Hold it there, James. Hold it there.
There are people who like to claim that men can't wrap things up.
We're proving them wrong. Look at this.
Do we want the door towards one side or in the middle?
Otherwise you can't get in.
I'll go in from the top.
Why don't we stand on a stepladder and put a screw from the top?
Yeah. Good idea.
Rather than cutting these because they're a bit of a pain,
there might be a way of folding them into each other.
So Yes.
Or is it like folding a piece of paper seven times?
It might well be.
Should we try a sausage?
Try a sausage, just in case.
It's like that thing, isn't it?
You can only fold a piece of paper so many times
before it becomes impossible to fold.
Did you just say that? Yeah.
I've said it before, but I was in there.
I couldn't hear you. Ah.
Honest.
Put your head behind there and say something.
I'd say that's working a bit.
I didn't hear a thing.
Is there a case for simply making a load of curtains
And just hanging them? Yeah.
That would be a lot easier, wouldn't it?
We had seven blankets over your head and we could still hear you,
even though it was muffled, so we need at least seven layers.
So we're halfway there with one blanket.
Okay, so that's not as drastic.
I'm all for, you know, speeding things up.
I think we should do a big wall.
So these are whole blankets now.
I think I think we should fold it and put it in
In these widths along the wall.
Oh, like that? Yeah.
Well, that's quite nice.
Why are you always surprised?
We'll leave Tony to finish his brilliant blanket layering solution.
And who knows? Perhaps we'll never hear from him again.
JAMES: Back in Wiltshire, you joined Simmy and me
enjoying a little time out in my pub.
But we're not totally off duty.
The locals know I can easily be persuaded
to open up my toolbox and take a look at their broken stuff.
Today, pub regular Piers has something
he'd like us to try to repair.
Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi. Nice to meet you.
It is.
I was told that this was something of great sentimental value.
Well, it gets used every day, but it doesn't function properly.
So the timer, which is about there, jams occasionally.
I have virtually the same toaster, as it happens.
It burns toast. And then I get a telling off from my wife.
Does your wife currently hate you because of the toaster?
Not every day. Right.
Shall we plug it in and have a look? There's a socket down there.
I've got some bread in my toolbox.
Look at that.
And I would give that two-and-a-half minutes.
Light is on.
Heat is rising off the toaster into my face.
And it smells of bread.
I think it works fine, Piers. You've wasted our time.
If only that were true.
Oh, it is, yes.
Have you ever taken it apart?
I think it's had some WD-40 in there.
On your toaster?
I'm not a technical person.
We've managed. Life is a compromise.
Absolutely.
We've still got another 30 seconds to go. That's going to be burnt.
Yeah, but the point is, you can then turn the elements off
and remove your toast when you need it.
But that requires you being present the entire time.
If you just walk away from it
and say, it's going to stop in two minutes.
Because the timer sticks,
you end up with white smoke.
The toaster as a toaster works perfectly.
The problem is with the timer.
And this is what is destroying domestic bliss for you.
So we will take the toaster away.
We won't touch any of that because it's fine.
We will extract the clockwork timer.
Check it for wear, burs in the escapement, that sort of thing.
Give it a good clean, reassemble it.
Can I commend you for bringing it in
Absolutely.
It means that my wife isn't going to give me grief
about half-burnt toast.
It will be fantastic. Thank you.
Thank you. The world thanks you.
Your wife, however, hates you.
Now I've promised to fix Pier's toaster,
Yeah.
So Simmy and I head straight for the workshop.
In the time it takes to make a piece of toast, we're there.
Ooh, look.
I have a toaster very similar to this.
And I seem to remember that you go in through the bottom.
And behind there, there is the timer mechanism.
SIM: That's very intricate, isn't it? It is.
There's a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of cack,
and that's just enough to make the teeth stick.
If we could make something that acts on the end of that spindle,
it will push it ever so gently in the direction
of the less-worn part of the escapement.
That something is going to be a tiny strip of phosphor bronze
that we'll attach with a teeny-tiny screw.
Some people enjoy high-octane action movies
with car chases, fist fights and guns.
Bad news if that's you.
Because the next bit involves two blokes
trying to solve a problem on an almost microscopic scale.
We're talking about maybe,
you know, less than a hundredth of a millimetre.
Is that actually cutting?
No, it wasn't. fascinating observations
Oh, it's going.
Oh, look at that. It's gone in.
and the odd low.
It stopped!
But after several nail-biting hours
Right.
We are so good.
To the relief of the crew,
we're ready to try our ingenious solution.
So what we have done is we have successfully opened up
and then tapped that tiny little hole there.
And now we have drilled a clearance hole
in the end of this strip of phosphor bronze
that the screw will just pass through cleanly.
Now I'll hold that without losing it.
This is turning me into a nervous wreck.
Snip that off.
Tidy up the end.
And then screw it into position, and it will do its job.
If the tense music hasn't already started,
now might be a good time.
Oh, my God, it's so small.
Is it going in?
Yeah.
Oh!
That's what we've achieved.
Doesn't look like much, but it's destroyed us.
Well, let's test it.
I almost don't want to now.
If for whatever reason, it doesn't do a full thing, I will cry.
I'm going to wind it all the way. Here we go, everybody.
Very well-done toast.
We have achieved!
We've actually done it, and we can't even see it.
It does work.
That's one of the greatest triumphs of my life.
And we've been at it for four hours. But it was worth it.
What else would we have done with those four hours?
All right, we're going to now reassemble this.
You don't need to see that. Next time you see this toaster,
it will be in the pub with Piers, and he will be astonished.
It stopped.
It's got to the end. It went all the way to the end.
Now that Piers's toaster is no longer toast,
it's time for me to head back to the pub,
where, once again, I'm thinking of ways
to help pubs all over the UK get more punters in.
And I've identified a potential twist on a well-known game
that involves combining two of my favourite things.
Hello. You join me apparently about to tuck into
a delicious cheeseboard.
But actually, no, I'm here to address
an age-old problem, and one that has blighted society
for many generations, namely cheese and biscuits.
The usual problem, the cheese runs out, the biscuits haven't.
You have more cheese, then the biscuits run out,
and then the cheese has run out and so on. And it never ends.
We wondered if one way around this problem
was to gamify cheese and biscuits.
I wondered if we could have a game of cheese chess
because, let's face it, both come on a board.
The word chess is very similar to the word cheese.
If you take the first 'S' of chess and turn it into an 'E'
and add another 'E' on the end, you have the same word.
And that can't be a coincidence, can it?
I thought using this convenient rubber mould,
we could use these cheeses to make chess pieces,
mount them on coloured crackers.
We have black ones and white ones.
They're actually grey and beige,
but I mean, the difference is apparent.
And then you play chess for pieces of cheese.
And we've selected the cheeses very carefully.
We have, for example, King of the Castle.
So that can be the king.
Stinking Bishop, that's going to be the bishop.
This cheese is an Italian one called Caciocavallo.
So that cavallo means horse. So that can be the knight.
Castle blue, that can be the rook.
This cheese is actually Norwegian,
and it is often marketed under the name Ski Queen.
And this is good old-fashioned mousetrap cheddar,
which can be our prawns, in case anybody thinks
that we're getting pretentious with the cheeses.
Now, these moulds, I believe,
will allow me to fashion cheese into chess pieces.
I'm then going to invite Tony and Sim to have a match.
And the winner I mean, you eat a piece if you take it.
But the winner at the end eats all the remaining cheese.
Now we just need to mould our cheese into chess.
I think I might hand this job over to a researcher on minimum wage.
Ethan.
Hello. How do you fancy making
I would love to.
It's a great chat up line, after all.
Of course, if this should ever catch on,
the staff would be quite annoyed
because it's quite a laborious process.
But maybe it will be a special, you know, cheese chess.
Cheese chessboard will have to cost something like £250.
Oh, eating cheese. Oh.
Please nobody tell Ethan, but just now,
when I was just picking at the cheese, I ate a bishop.
I don't think he noticed.
Oh, . I said that.
Why was I so cocky about that?
I'll start again.
Oh, that's very runny and sticky.
That's not gonna work.
That is absolute rubbish.
Yes!
That is the beginnings of a cheese chess set.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
You saw it here first.
Once we filled the other moulds and left them to set,
we may actually be able to have a game if I haven't eaten it.
You join us back in Wiltshire,
where I am solving problems big and small,
as well as thinking of ways to help
Britain's wonderful but dwindling pubs,
not mine, by the way, bring in more customers.
And I've invited Tony and Simmy over to showcase my latest idea.
MAN: Action.
and Ethan and I, by which I mean Ethan,
has produced what we believe is the world's first cheese chess set.
And here it is.
TONY: Very good.
Except, I know you're going to say the bishop, yes.
Bishop is made out of Stinking Bishop,
which cannot be moulded into the shape of a bishop.
SIM: That's fine.
But as long as you remember, blob, bishop. Blob, bishop.
Tasty. The rules of the game
The difference is that if you take a piece, you can eat it.
This is ultimately a cheese board disguised as a game of chess.
So without further ado, let the tournament begin.
Go!
What's he done there?
I've just realised a flaw in this segment.
Surely there's no flaw.
Cheese or not, we're now watching a game of chess.
I don't want you to move it.
I've touched it, I'll move it. Rules.
The bishops are out.
I'm starving. I want to eat it. I don't care.
I really wanted to try a bit of, um, bishop. Mm!
We've got to eat it quite quick.
Nice.
Lush.
Your go, Tony. You've got to keep the speed up
Okay.
I think I'll take Oh, h'way!
I think I'll take this piece here.
James, you might as well try that piece.
That is a delicious bit of cheese.
This is the Italian cavallo cheese.
I didn't try this during the manufacture of the pieces.
Yum!
That's pretty good, isn't it?
I've spotted another flaw in the game of cheese chess.
Before long, eating cheese takes over.
I love it. I love it.
It stops chess being boring because you become obsessed with the cheese.
Cheese is the best bit. You have to get better at chess
if you want the cheese. Exactly.
This makes you earn your cheese.
Earn your cheese. That's fine, though.
No, I'm afraid
And you have eaten a piece of cheese incorrectly.
You played your king into check
Hang on.
Whoa! There you go.
I didn't realise. I was going for the cheese.
Simeon Oakley, the field of cheese is yours.
Fantastic.
James, would you like some cheese?
What would you like?
You'd like a king?
Would you like Tony's king? I would like my king.
I quite like Cheers. What about me?
What about gentlemanly conduct? No.
I gave it all
That's not a gentleman's game.
That's poor form, Tony.
The lust for cheese overcame any thoughts of strategy
or tactics or even cunning.
All the things you associate with a intellectual game like chess.
It was just, 'Cheese, cheese. Give me some cheese'.
Brilliant.
Fantastic. Cheese chess. Thank you for watching.
Before we crack open another packet of Stinking Bishop
and lose all sense of reason to cheese,
we should get back to our soundproof room.
Now fully smothered in blankets
and ready to silence those noisy neighbours.
Let's see if it's as good as it sounds.
Hello, I'm James May from Bad Jacket and Volvo Estate Agents,
and I'm here to show you around this character property
that has become available in the southwest of England.
It is, as you can see, clad in furniture blankets.
It's also insulated with furniture blankets,
and it's lined with furniture blankets.
The roof is made of furniture blankets.
And the floor inside is beautifully finished in furniture blankets.
Not this floor, the floor inside there, you fool.
We're going to test it with some well-known noises
outside and inside to see if it makes any difference.
The noises are an argument between Tony and Simmy
about whether or not Simmy qualifies as a builder
because he built an extension on his house himself.
Trumpet practise.
And
a noisy power tool.
On the stick right there is the decibel metre.
So here we go.
We're going to have half a minute of arguing in three, two, one.
I don't think it was an argument. It was more of a discussion. Yeah.
You said I didn't build a house when I did build one.
You didn't build a house, you built an extension on a house.
No, no, no. You didn't build a house.
You didn't build a house! I built a house!
I built a house!
Half a house. It's not a house, I win.
It's almost Almost a whole house.
So you almost built a house.
So, Lucy, argument outside
is 87.6.
Now, if you wouldn't mind going
After you. Thank you.
And I will close the door.
You went through the wrong way then, Simmy.
Here is the multilayered curtain door.
Can you hear me?
Sorry?
Go.
All right, I kind of get what you're saying, but - There you go.
But I did build quite a lot of a house.
Okay, we're getting somewhere now.
To almost a house. To half a house and half a roof.
And now, I'm just gonna get trolled -
Enough. You can come out.
Lucy, um, the volume outside of the row room was
87.6.
And inside the row room Gentlemen, you peaked at 36.
Thirty-six? Oi!
That's massive.
Let's try trumpet practise.
Okay.
is that I can't play the trumpet.
Brilliant.
It's all about embouchure, isn't it, the trumpet?
It's plenty difficult playing the trumpet.
What was the reading?
That's quite loud.
I'm going in.
I'm sorry. I've lost my strength.
72.2.
I think it was 90
And now, it's 72.2.
That's not a bad result, is it?
That's only about a quarter of the noise that it was.
Let's see what happens with the power tool.
The most annoying power tool we have is the saw.
Are we ready?
84.8 for power tool external.
Okay, Tony, into the mediaeval tent of heat and horrors.
Finger off trigger.
You can come out now.
I was worried you were gonna put your hand through that and then
Cut your hand off.
So, um
MAN: 55.8. 55.8
84.8.
That was noticeably quieter.
I think this is quite remarkable
because the greatest effect was, in fact, on your row.
Mm-hmm. That was
between outside and inside, and that's primarily what it's for.
More people have arguments than are learning to play the trumpet.
But similarly, if you have one of these in your house
and somebody starts playing the trumpet or having a row,
you can go in there and be at peace.
Insulation works in both directions.
When I go in here, I can't hear what you lot are talking about.
You, you insult me, and I won't be able to hear it.
MAN 1: Thank God he's gone. He's just rubbish.
Awful. Overrated has been.
That's weird. I can hear all of that.
It's good. It's really good.
You can make this at home easily. You just need some wood, two mates,
some power tools, a big, open space, lots and lots of screws,
a staple gun, 150 blankets,
some fairy lights, a lamp and a film crew.
And you could do all this as well, and it works.
We've done something that works.
Well done.
For once, I'm happy to blow my own trumpet.
Back in Wiltshire, we're in the workshop,
where we spend our days coming up with incredible inventions
to solve life's annoying problems.
But sometimes, just sometimes, we like to kick back and relax.
Do you reckon, if you
if you were in the dark or blindfolded
Yeah. I handed you
Okay.
and see if you could guess what it is, we could call it
Can you handle the truth?
About tools.
Go on.
Mm-hmm.
It's an, um, marking gauge.
A bit more specific? Yeah.
An adjustable marking gauge.
You're a woodworker.
We use power tools most of the time and the CNC machine.
A double adjustable marking gauge.
No points to Tony.
Half a point.
Half a point for getting That's a mortice gauge
because you set the distance from the edge of the wood
and then you set the size of your mortice, and that there.
He's got a blindfold on, hasn't he?
Oh, very good.
And that's the handle? Yeah.
It's not pliers. One of them things you punch holes in leather with.
That's pretty good.
Hey! can I keep it if I've guessed it right? No.
It's a rubbish game, this.
Okay. Come on. You ready?
It's very light.
No idea. What is it?
You can take the blindfold off now because you've got nil pois.
Okay, so right. So you've got one-and-a-half out of three.
That's 50%.
That's a C.
Now it's Simmy's turn to don the tea towel.
Not in a million years.
It's the tappet adjusting tool for a Honda CB750.
Yes, it is. But he's gonna do that to me, I know.
Ooh. Handle only.
Whoa.
I'm gonna say that's plastic, and it's for doing something up.
But I don't know what it is, and I don't know what it's called.
That's a zero in my books. Yeah.
Oh, ah.
It's the tappet adjusting tool for a Honda CB750.
Of course it is.
And it was for adjusting something.
Come on.
Yeah, you can have half a point.
Ooh! Good choice, sir.
Hand out.
Handle only.
That is a bevel of some sort.
Sliding bevel. Yes.
Ooh. You can only hold the handle. Oh, that's heavy.
All right. That is some kind of driver, drill thing.
It's a drill. It's a drill, yes.
Very good. I've got two-and-a-half to beat. That's quite tricky.
Blindfold on? Blindfold is on.
That's a wooden handle with some rivets in it.
Is it a marking out knife?
Perfect. Is it?
That's Oh, I know exactly what that is.
That's a spokeshave.
Okay, so the confession with this one, James
is I've got no clue what it is.
I know exactly what it is. Do you? Yeah.
Um, am I right in saying it's right angled?
Yeah.
Is it a cabinet scraper?
I think that's a veneer hammer.
Oh, is that what it is?
Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, nil pois.
Yes!
Join us next week for another thrilling episode of
Can You Handle the Truth?
And now we must down tools and head over to the pub,
as Piers is on his way back
to find out if we've managed to fix his broken toaster,
and, along with it, perhaps restore some marital harmony to his home.
So this is Piers's toaster, which we have mended.
It was quite difficult.
There was an easy way of mending it, which was buy a new one of those.
We didn't want to do that because we're not defeatist, and it works.
And this will transform his life because so far,
he hasn't been able to walk away from it and leave it unattended.
Let's bring him in. Where is he?
Piers! James, hi.
Look at that. All you can
It's shiny. Yes.
Just before we go into this,
I want to say it is okay to become emotional.
Don't bottle anything up.
Your life was fundamentally ruined
because you could not leave a toaster,
that is designed to be left unattended, unattended.
Absolutely. Yeah.
The good news is that after
Oh, my God.
No.
We could easily have just bought a new timer.
They're something like 25 quid.
But we discovered, having examined it very carefully,
the timer works on a simple escapement mechanism,
which has two panners, which work against
a reciprocating gear wheel, which was slightly worn out.
There's a bit of end float in the shaft associated with it.
If we push that with our fingernail, moved it up
by quarter of a millimetre, the thing ran perfectly.
So we made a phosphor bronze leaf spring
from a bit of scrap I had in my toolbox.
Retapped an existing hole in the mechanism
to take an m 1.5 screw, and adjusted the tension
so the shaft was pushed up by a quarter of a millimetre.
James, fantastic.
I think my toast will never taste the same again.
You must have a bit with you.
Well, we have some bread.
There's some bread.
Here is some locally-sourced British butter.
There is a napkin. And here is some red jam.
We're about to make exciting TV, where a timer counts down.
Okay. Have you put it
Um, I always leave it like that.
You must have two toast setting on, but not the bun slot.
Otherwise, you'll overheat the elements.
Then you'll bring it back to us to mend again.
Okay. And we go for two and a tiny bit.
So now, basically, I could just walk away
and make a cup of coffee, do whatever.
Try it. Try walking away.
I don't need to. I trust you. I know.
You've been traumatised by this. You feel you can't.
Just walk to the other side of the pub.
Right. I'll walk away. There we go.
You have to go into the other room, where you can't see it.
This is the first time in years that Piers has been able to walk away
from his toaster while it's toasting.
You haven't touched it. On one.
Could have made your coffee.
That'd been perfect. Absolutely. And it smells like toast.
Nothing wrong with this bit. Elements work beautifully.
They were all fine?
They are infinitely repairable, as we've proved.
And you enjoyed doing it, didn't you, James?
Yes.
Now to see whether the timer will do its job
and stop the toaster toasting.
There we go. See?
Perfect. Look at that.
You tuck in.
So I'm pleased to see
Yes, not triangles.
Right. Here we go.
That's fine.
That is brilliant. Everything
I'm a happy man.
Mm.
Really, you can't ask for a greater privilege in life than that.
It's like saving a life in a way.
Mm-hmm.
Literally. Great.
We'll call it a day because it's good to quit whilst you're ahead.
Absolutely. Sim, thank you so much. James, thank you so much.
Really, really appreciate it.
So that's another successful repair job.
And who knows? Perhaps also a marriage restored.
Let's toast to that.
JAMES: Hello.
These days, I spend more and more time in my Wiltshire home
and the pub I own,
thinking about all the big problems in the world
and some smaller ones that annoy me.
Luckily, there's a place I can go to solve them all,
or at least try
my shed.
Right.
It's here that I have the tools
Let's just saw some wood up.
the tea Mm.
and a couple of other highly-competent blokes.
Very good. Brace yourself.
who've agreed to help me rid the world of problems
Is she getting a ticket out?
Dirty fly tippers. and small.
The cereal has gone soggy.
I'll also have to take on other people's problems.
He used to make a sound, now he doesn't.
By which I mean the locals at my pub,
who are always bringing me stuff to mend.
Is it a train set?
So join us and our excitable crew.
We will capture our endeavours
That was epic.
as we create
make That feels like a terrible thing we've just done.
repair So it's never worked.
Not in my lifetime.
Wow! in my Shed Load Of Ideas.
What do you think? This is just brilliant.
The Wiltshire countryside can be wonderfully peaceful,
but like the rest of the UK, it can also sometimes be very noisy.
A noise complaint is made every 70 seconds in the UK.
And even here, we're not immune
to annoying noises from our neighbours.
Oh, no, sound like a right barney.
Let's go somewhere else.
It's a domestic.
Oh, drilling.
Nobody ever says, 'Why don't we soundproof Britain?'
In fact, you don't need to soundproof the whole house.
You just need just, like, a small room.
If you want to play the trumpet or have an argument or something,
you go into the room that's soundproof,
and then it doesn't bother your neighbours.
Actually, that's not a bad idea, is it?
Could we make a soundproof box?
The World Health Organisation says noise pollution is a major concern,
so this is a serious problem.
Let's see if we can help neighbourly relations everywhere
by making a soundproof box or room
that will keep annoying noises contained within it.
First things first, Tony the Tool is going to help me investigate
the best sound absorbing materials.
MAN: Okay. Is everyone happy? Action.
Tony has made a very simple rig
in order to test the sound-absorbing qualities
of various items that you would find around a typical household.
This is a box.
In the top of the box goes the decibel-o-meter
through that convenient little hole.
In the middle is a shelf on which we put our materials.
And in the bottom there is a Bluetooth speaker,
which will play a sound from this phone.
Obviously, some sound will be transmitted through the box.
We realise that. What we're looking for
is the difference between these materials.
This will give us some idea of how we can make our soundproof box.
There's a door, and it is sealed with a clamp.
All we need now is a suitable sound.
So I thought if you could give a blood curdling,
murderous scream, Tony, we could use that.
Yep.
That was excellent.
Right, So to begin with, if we turn on the decibel-o-metre
and put his little, it's like the family stone, head on.
Right, that's holding max.
So the maximum reading will remain frozen on the screen.
So let's try it first with nothing.
So you shut Tony's carefully-engineered box
with this beautiful piano hinge
that you see typically on Chippendale furniture.
There is the door shut.
Okay, so this is controlled. Quiet, please.
107.7 is the reading on the decibel-o-metre
with nothing in the box.
Now remember that decibels are a logarithmic scale,
which means an increase of three is double the noise,
as far as your ear is concerned.
Let's begin with Let's go through what we've got.
We have a typical pillow, some furniture moving blankets,
some egg boxes, a breakfast cereal.
We're not allowed to say which one it is.
It's very popular. It's also very snapular and crackular.
And builder's sand.
Which would you like to go with first?
Shall we go with Let's go with egg boxes.
Normally they half them, don't they, and have that bit sicking out.
I think, yeah.
People do stick egg boxes up in things like
their home-recording studios and home cinemas, don't they?
Quiet, everybody, please.
101.5. Interesting.
102 dead.
Then a furniture blanket.
88.2.
Excellent performance from the blanket.
The popular breakfast cereal,
which we happened to have in the kitchen was my idea
because I feel they will move about and absorb sound.
They will also deform very slightly, and they are full of air.
That's not particularly tremendous reasoning,
but this is an experiment, remember.
Very disappointing from the breakfast cereal.
That's higher than the control.
No.
It is noisy cereal, though.
It's 108.6.
And finally, we tried builder's sand.
Oh, no. That is disappointing.
It's better than the egg boxes, though.
Very slightly better than the egg box.
The conclusion is that
our soundproof room within a room
Blankets. blankets.
88.2.
Right. Onwards.
So after buying a shedload of blankets
and picking up Simmy, we three return to the workshop
to begin making our soundproof room in a room,
which will be a supersized version of Tony's soundproof box.
Say when.
First, we demonstrate the result of our noise research
Here's one more. Brace yourself.
which looks like workplace bullying.
It's definitely getting quieter. Maybe a little scream.
Right. Okay.
What we decided, viewers, was that the best sound-deadening material
of those things that you might have around the house
is the removal blanket.
Now, here we have a pile of 150 of them.
There's going to be a frame,
Yeah.
And the blanket walls will also be filled with blankets.
SIM: Yes, let's do that.
If this works, people could take our prototype concept
What you're seeing here, viewers,
is the basic element of mass production.
and turn a room in their own house into a soundproof room.
Nicely done.
We're constructing a very simple wooden cube,
but crucially, we're leaving a small cavity
between the inside and outside walls.
There can't be any physical connection,
or as little as possible between the inner and outer wall
because the dense wood would transfer the sound.
So you've got to avoid that.
You've got to keep the gap all the way around.
Then we fill it up with sound-deadening material,
which is blankets.
If you hadn't worked it out already, viewers,
you can now see what this is going to look like.
There it is.
Okay, so now we're going to curtain the inside.
Hold it there, James. Hold it there.
There are people who like to claim that men can't wrap things up.
We're proving them wrong. Look at this.
Do we want the door towards one side or in the middle?
Otherwise you can't get in.
I'll go in from the top.
Why don't we stand on a stepladder and put a screw from the top?
Yeah. Good idea.
Rather than cutting these because they're a bit of a pain,
there might be a way of folding them into each other.
So Yes.
Or is it like folding a piece of paper seven times?
It might well be.
Should we try a sausage?
Try a sausage, just in case.
It's like that thing, isn't it?
You can only fold a piece of paper so many times
before it becomes impossible to fold.
Did you just say that? Yeah.
I've said it before, but I was in there.
I couldn't hear you. Ah.
Honest.
Put your head behind there and say something.
I'd say that's working a bit.
I didn't hear a thing.
Is there a case for simply making a load of curtains
And just hanging them? Yeah.
That would be a lot easier, wouldn't it?
We had seven blankets over your head and we could still hear you,
even though it was muffled, so we need at least seven layers.
So we're halfway there with one blanket.
Okay, so that's not as drastic.
I'm all for, you know, speeding things up.
I think we should do a big wall.
So these are whole blankets now.
I think I think we should fold it and put it in
In these widths along the wall.
Oh, like that? Yeah.
Well, that's quite nice.
Why are you always surprised?
We'll leave Tony to finish his brilliant blanket layering solution.
And who knows? Perhaps we'll never hear from him again.
JAMES: Back in Wiltshire, you joined Simmy and me
enjoying a little time out in my pub.
But we're not totally off duty.
The locals know I can easily be persuaded
to open up my toolbox and take a look at their broken stuff.
Today, pub regular Piers has something
he'd like us to try to repair.
Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi. Nice to meet you.
It is.
I was told that this was something of great sentimental value.
Well, it gets used every day, but it doesn't function properly.
So the timer, which is about there, jams occasionally.
I have virtually the same toaster, as it happens.
It burns toast. And then I get a telling off from my wife.
Does your wife currently hate you because of the toaster?
Not every day. Right.
Shall we plug it in and have a look? There's a socket down there.
I've got some bread in my toolbox.
Look at that.
And I would give that two-and-a-half minutes.
Light is on.
Heat is rising off the toaster into my face.
And it smells of bread.
I think it works fine, Piers. You've wasted our time.
If only that were true.
Oh, it is, yes.
Have you ever taken it apart?
I think it's had some WD-40 in there.
On your toaster?
I'm not a technical person.
We've managed. Life is a compromise.
Absolutely.
We've still got another 30 seconds to go. That's going to be burnt.
Yeah, but the point is, you can then turn the elements off
and remove your toast when you need it.
But that requires you being present the entire time.
If you just walk away from it
and say, it's going to stop in two minutes.
Because the timer sticks,
you end up with white smoke.
The toaster as a toaster works perfectly.
The problem is with the timer.
And this is what is destroying domestic bliss for you.
So we will take the toaster away.
We won't touch any of that because it's fine.
We will extract the clockwork timer.
Check it for wear, burs in the escapement, that sort of thing.
Give it a good clean, reassemble it.
Can I commend you for bringing it in
Absolutely.
It means that my wife isn't going to give me grief
about half-burnt toast.
It will be fantastic. Thank you.
Thank you. The world thanks you.
Your wife, however, hates you.
Now I've promised to fix Pier's toaster,
Yeah.
So Simmy and I head straight for the workshop.
In the time it takes to make a piece of toast, we're there.
Ooh, look.
I have a toaster very similar to this.
And I seem to remember that you go in through the bottom.
And behind there, there is the timer mechanism.
SIM: That's very intricate, isn't it? It is.
There's a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of cack,
and that's just enough to make the teeth stick.
If we could make something that acts on the end of that spindle,
it will push it ever so gently in the direction
of the less-worn part of the escapement.
That something is going to be a tiny strip of phosphor bronze
that we'll attach with a teeny-tiny screw.
Some people enjoy high-octane action movies
with car chases, fist fights and guns.
Bad news if that's you.
Because the next bit involves two blokes
trying to solve a problem on an almost microscopic scale.
We're talking about maybe,
you know, less than a hundredth of a millimetre.
Is that actually cutting?
No, it wasn't. fascinating observations
Oh, it's going.
Oh, look at that. It's gone in.
and the odd low.
It stopped!
But after several nail-biting hours
Right.
We are so good.
To the relief of the crew,
we're ready to try our ingenious solution.
So what we have done is we have successfully opened up
and then tapped that tiny little hole there.
And now we have drilled a clearance hole
in the end of this strip of phosphor bronze
that the screw will just pass through cleanly.
Now I'll hold that without losing it.
This is turning me into a nervous wreck.
Snip that off.
Tidy up the end.
And then screw it into position, and it will do its job.
If the tense music hasn't already started,
now might be a good time.
Oh, my God, it's so small.
Is it going in?
Yeah.
Oh!
That's what we've achieved.
Doesn't look like much, but it's destroyed us.
Well, let's test it.
I almost don't want to now.
If for whatever reason, it doesn't do a full thing, I will cry.
I'm going to wind it all the way. Here we go, everybody.
Very well-done toast.
We have achieved!
We've actually done it, and we can't even see it.
It does work.
That's one of the greatest triumphs of my life.
And we've been at it for four hours. But it was worth it.
What else would we have done with those four hours?
All right, we're going to now reassemble this.
You don't need to see that. Next time you see this toaster,
it will be in the pub with Piers, and he will be astonished.
It stopped.
It's got to the end. It went all the way to the end.
Now that Piers's toaster is no longer toast,
it's time for me to head back to the pub,
where, once again, I'm thinking of ways
to help pubs all over the UK get more punters in.
And I've identified a potential twist on a well-known game
that involves combining two of my favourite things.
Hello. You join me apparently about to tuck into
a delicious cheeseboard.
But actually, no, I'm here to address
an age-old problem, and one that has blighted society
for many generations, namely cheese and biscuits.
The usual problem, the cheese runs out, the biscuits haven't.
You have more cheese, then the biscuits run out,
and then the cheese has run out and so on. And it never ends.
We wondered if one way around this problem
was to gamify cheese and biscuits.
I wondered if we could have a game of cheese chess
because, let's face it, both come on a board.
The word chess is very similar to the word cheese.
If you take the first 'S' of chess and turn it into an 'E'
and add another 'E' on the end, you have the same word.
And that can't be a coincidence, can it?
I thought using this convenient rubber mould,
we could use these cheeses to make chess pieces,
mount them on coloured crackers.
We have black ones and white ones.
They're actually grey and beige,
but I mean, the difference is apparent.
And then you play chess for pieces of cheese.
And we've selected the cheeses very carefully.
We have, for example, King of the Castle.
So that can be the king.
Stinking Bishop, that's going to be the bishop.
This cheese is an Italian one called Caciocavallo.
So that cavallo means horse. So that can be the knight.
Castle blue, that can be the rook.
This cheese is actually Norwegian,
and it is often marketed under the name Ski Queen.
And this is good old-fashioned mousetrap cheddar,
which can be our prawns, in case anybody thinks
that we're getting pretentious with the cheeses.
Now, these moulds, I believe,
will allow me to fashion cheese into chess pieces.
I'm then going to invite Tony and Sim to have a match.
And the winner I mean, you eat a piece if you take it.
But the winner at the end eats all the remaining cheese.
Now we just need to mould our cheese into chess.
I think I might hand this job over to a researcher on minimum wage.
Ethan.
Hello. How do you fancy making
I would love to.
It's a great chat up line, after all.
Of course, if this should ever catch on,
the staff would be quite annoyed
because it's quite a laborious process.
But maybe it will be a special, you know, cheese chess.
Cheese chessboard will have to cost something like £250.
Oh, eating cheese. Oh.
Please nobody tell Ethan, but just now,
when I was just picking at the cheese, I ate a bishop.
I don't think he noticed.
Oh, . I said that.
Why was I so cocky about that?
I'll start again.
Oh, that's very runny and sticky.
That's not gonna work.
That is absolute rubbish.
Yes!
That is the beginnings of a cheese chess set.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
You saw it here first.
Once we filled the other moulds and left them to set,
we may actually be able to have a game if I haven't eaten it.
You join us back in Wiltshire,
where I am solving problems big and small,
as well as thinking of ways to help
Britain's wonderful but dwindling pubs,
not mine, by the way, bring in more customers.
And I've invited Tony and Simmy over to showcase my latest idea.
MAN: Action.
and Ethan and I, by which I mean Ethan,
has produced what we believe is the world's first cheese chess set.
And here it is.
TONY: Very good.
Except, I know you're going to say the bishop, yes.
Bishop is made out of Stinking Bishop,
which cannot be moulded into the shape of a bishop.
SIM: That's fine.
But as long as you remember, blob, bishop. Blob, bishop.
Tasty. The rules of the game
The difference is that if you take a piece, you can eat it.
This is ultimately a cheese board disguised as a game of chess.
So without further ado, let the tournament begin.
Go!
What's he done there?
I've just realised a flaw in this segment.
Surely there's no flaw.
Cheese or not, we're now watching a game of chess.
I don't want you to move it.
I've touched it, I'll move it. Rules.
The bishops are out.
I'm starving. I want to eat it. I don't care.
I really wanted to try a bit of, um, bishop. Mm!
We've got to eat it quite quick.
Nice.
Lush.
Your go, Tony. You've got to keep the speed up
Okay.
I think I'll take Oh, h'way!
I think I'll take this piece here.
James, you might as well try that piece.
That is a delicious bit of cheese.
This is the Italian cavallo cheese.
I didn't try this during the manufacture of the pieces.
Yum!
That's pretty good, isn't it?
I've spotted another flaw in the game of cheese chess.
Before long, eating cheese takes over.
I love it. I love it.
It stops chess being boring because you become obsessed with the cheese.
Cheese is the best bit. You have to get better at chess
if you want the cheese. Exactly.
This makes you earn your cheese.
Earn your cheese. That's fine, though.
No, I'm afraid
And you have eaten a piece of cheese incorrectly.
You played your king into check
Hang on.
Whoa! There you go.
I didn't realise. I was going for the cheese.
Simeon Oakley, the field of cheese is yours.
Fantastic.
James, would you like some cheese?
What would you like?
You'd like a king?
Would you like Tony's king? I would like my king.
I quite like Cheers. What about me?
What about gentlemanly conduct? No.
I gave it all
That's not a gentleman's game.
That's poor form, Tony.
The lust for cheese overcame any thoughts of strategy
or tactics or even cunning.
All the things you associate with a intellectual game like chess.
It was just, 'Cheese, cheese. Give me some cheese'.
Brilliant.
Fantastic. Cheese chess. Thank you for watching.
Before we crack open another packet of Stinking Bishop
and lose all sense of reason to cheese,
we should get back to our soundproof room.
Now fully smothered in blankets
and ready to silence those noisy neighbours.
Let's see if it's as good as it sounds.
Hello, I'm James May from Bad Jacket and Volvo Estate Agents,
and I'm here to show you around this character property
that has become available in the southwest of England.
It is, as you can see, clad in furniture blankets.
It's also insulated with furniture blankets,
and it's lined with furniture blankets.
The roof is made of furniture blankets.
And the floor inside is beautifully finished in furniture blankets.
Not this floor, the floor inside there, you fool.
We're going to test it with some well-known noises
outside and inside to see if it makes any difference.
The noises are an argument between Tony and Simmy
about whether or not Simmy qualifies as a builder
because he built an extension on his house himself.
Trumpet practise.
And
a noisy power tool.
On the stick right there is the decibel metre.
So here we go.
We're going to have half a minute of arguing in three, two, one.
I don't think it was an argument. It was more of a discussion. Yeah.
You said I didn't build a house when I did build one.
You didn't build a house, you built an extension on a house.
No, no, no. You didn't build a house.
You didn't build a house! I built a house!
I built a house!
Half a house. It's not a house, I win.
It's almost Almost a whole house.
So you almost built a house.
So, Lucy, argument outside
is 87.6.
Now, if you wouldn't mind going
After you. Thank you.
And I will close the door.
You went through the wrong way then, Simmy.
Here is the multilayered curtain door.
Can you hear me?
Sorry?
Go.
All right, I kind of get what you're saying, but - There you go.
But I did build quite a lot of a house.
Okay, we're getting somewhere now.
To almost a house. To half a house and half a roof.
And now, I'm just gonna get trolled -
Enough. You can come out.
Lucy, um, the volume outside of the row room was
87.6.
And inside the row room Gentlemen, you peaked at 36.
Thirty-six? Oi!
That's massive.
Let's try trumpet practise.
Okay.
is that I can't play the trumpet.
Brilliant.
It's all about embouchure, isn't it, the trumpet?
It's plenty difficult playing the trumpet.
What was the reading?
That's quite loud.
I'm going in.
I'm sorry. I've lost my strength.
72.2.
I think it was 90
And now, it's 72.2.
That's not a bad result, is it?
That's only about a quarter of the noise that it was.
Let's see what happens with the power tool.
The most annoying power tool we have is the saw.
Are we ready?
84.8 for power tool external.
Okay, Tony, into the mediaeval tent of heat and horrors.
Finger off trigger.
You can come out now.
I was worried you were gonna put your hand through that and then
Cut your hand off.
So, um
MAN: 55.8. 55.8
84.8.
That was noticeably quieter.
I think this is quite remarkable
because the greatest effect was, in fact, on your row.
Mm-hmm. That was
between outside and inside, and that's primarily what it's for.
More people have arguments than are learning to play the trumpet.
But similarly, if you have one of these in your house
and somebody starts playing the trumpet or having a row,
you can go in there and be at peace.
Insulation works in both directions.
When I go in here, I can't hear what you lot are talking about.
You, you insult me, and I won't be able to hear it.
MAN 1: Thank God he's gone. He's just rubbish.
Awful. Overrated has been.
That's weird. I can hear all of that.
It's good. It's really good.
You can make this at home easily. You just need some wood, two mates,
some power tools, a big, open space, lots and lots of screws,
a staple gun, 150 blankets,
some fairy lights, a lamp and a film crew.
And you could do all this as well, and it works.
We've done something that works.
Well done.
For once, I'm happy to blow my own trumpet.
Back in Wiltshire, we're in the workshop,
where we spend our days coming up with incredible inventions
to solve life's annoying problems.
But sometimes, just sometimes, we like to kick back and relax.
Do you reckon, if you
if you were in the dark or blindfolded
Yeah. I handed you
Okay.
and see if you could guess what it is, we could call it
Can you handle the truth?
About tools.
Go on.
Mm-hmm.
It's an, um, marking gauge.
A bit more specific? Yeah.
An adjustable marking gauge.
You're a woodworker.
We use power tools most of the time and the CNC machine.
A double adjustable marking gauge.
No points to Tony.
Half a point.
Half a point for getting That's a mortice gauge
because you set the distance from the edge of the wood
and then you set the size of your mortice, and that there.
He's got a blindfold on, hasn't he?
Oh, very good.
And that's the handle? Yeah.
It's not pliers. One of them things you punch holes in leather with.
That's pretty good.
Hey! can I keep it if I've guessed it right? No.
It's a rubbish game, this.
Okay. Come on. You ready?
It's very light.
No idea. What is it?
You can take the blindfold off now because you've got nil pois.
Okay, so right. So you've got one-and-a-half out of three.
That's 50%.
That's a C.
Now it's Simmy's turn to don the tea towel.
Not in a million years.
It's the tappet adjusting tool for a Honda CB750.
Yes, it is. But he's gonna do that to me, I know.
Ooh. Handle only.
Whoa.
I'm gonna say that's plastic, and it's for doing something up.
But I don't know what it is, and I don't know what it's called.
That's a zero in my books. Yeah.
Oh, ah.
It's the tappet adjusting tool for a Honda CB750.
Of course it is.
And it was for adjusting something.
Come on.
Yeah, you can have half a point.
Ooh! Good choice, sir.
Hand out.
Handle only.
That is a bevel of some sort.
Sliding bevel. Yes.
Ooh. You can only hold the handle. Oh, that's heavy.
All right. That is some kind of driver, drill thing.
It's a drill. It's a drill, yes.
Very good. I've got two-and-a-half to beat. That's quite tricky.
Blindfold on? Blindfold is on.
That's a wooden handle with some rivets in it.
Is it a marking out knife?
Perfect. Is it?
That's Oh, I know exactly what that is.
That's a spokeshave.
Okay, so the confession with this one, James
is I've got no clue what it is.
I know exactly what it is. Do you? Yeah.
Um, am I right in saying it's right angled?
Yeah.
Is it a cabinet scraper?
I think that's a veneer hammer.
Oh, is that what it is?
Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, nil pois.
Yes!
Join us next week for another thrilling episode of
Can You Handle the Truth?
And now we must down tools and head over to the pub,
as Piers is on his way back
to find out if we've managed to fix his broken toaster,
and, along with it, perhaps restore some marital harmony to his home.
So this is Piers's toaster, which we have mended.
It was quite difficult.
There was an easy way of mending it, which was buy a new one of those.
We didn't want to do that because we're not defeatist, and it works.
And this will transform his life because so far,
he hasn't been able to walk away from it and leave it unattended.
Let's bring him in. Where is he?
Piers! James, hi.
Look at that. All you can
It's shiny. Yes.
Just before we go into this,
I want to say it is okay to become emotional.
Don't bottle anything up.
Your life was fundamentally ruined
because you could not leave a toaster,
that is designed to be left unattended, unattended.
Absolutely. Yeah.
The good news is that after
Oh, my God.
No.
We could easily have just bought a new timer.
They're something like 25 quid.
But we discovered, having examined it very carefully,
the timer works on a simple escapement mechanism,
which has two panners, which work against
a reciprocating gear wheel, which was slightly worn out.
There's a bit of end float in the shaft associated with it.
If we push that with our fingernail, moved it up
by quarter of a millimetre, the thing ran perfectly.
So we made a phosphor bronze leaf spring
from a bit of scrap I had in my toolbox.
Retapped an existing hole in the mechanism
to take an m 1.5 screw, and adjusted the tension
so the shaft was pushed up by a quarter of a millimetre.
James, fantastic.
I think my toast will never taste the same again.
You must have a bit with you.
Well, we have some bread.
There's some bread.
Here is some locally-sourced British butter.
There is a napkin. And here is some red jam.
We're about to make exciting TV, where a timer counts down.
Okay. Have you put it
Um, I always leave it like that.
You must have two toast setting on, but not the bun slot.
Otherwise, you'll overheat the elements.
Then you'll bring it back to us to mend again.
Okay. And we go for two and a tiny bit.
So now, basically, I could just walk away
and make a cup of coffee, do whatever.
Try it. Try walking away.
I don't need to. I trust you. I know.
You've been traumatised by this. You feel you can't.
Just walk to the other side of the pub.
Right. I'll walk away. There we go.
You have to go into the other room, where you can't see it.
This is the first time in years that Piers has been able to walk away
from his toaster while it's toasting.
You haven't touched it. On one.
Could have made your coffee.
That'd been perfect. Absolutely. And it smells like toast.
Nothing wrong with this bit. Elements work beautifully.
They were all fine?
They are infinitely repairable, as we've proved.
And you enjoyed doing it, didn't you, James?
Yes.
Now to see whether the timer will do its job
and stop the toaster toasting.
There we go. See?
Perfect. Look at that.
You tuck in.
So I'm pleased to see
Yes, not triangles.
Right. Here we go.
That's fine.
That is brilliant. Everything
I'm a happy man.
Mm.
Really, you can't ask for a greater privilege in life than that.
It's like saving a life in a way.
Mm-hmm.
Literally. Great.
We'll call it a day because it's good to quit whilst you're ahead.
Absolutely. Sim, thank you so much. James, thank you so much.
Really, really appreciate it.
So that's another successful repair job.
And who knows? Perhaps also a marriage restored.
Let's toast to that.