Nothing but good happens in The Repair Shop, a thoroughly commendable television show in which pleasant men and women bring beloved but damaged objects to a team of equally pleasant craftspeople who will repair them and make them like new. At the start of every show we see an ancient thatched barn as Bill Paterson’s reassuring voice sets the scene. This is a place where “precious and faded treasures are restored to their former glory”; where “heritage craft skills passed down the generations” are exercised; a place where, not least, the conversation between owners and restorers “unlocks the story” inside every object. Inside the barn, the craftspeople are already at work: sandpapering, sawing, sewing, stuffing, burnishing, painting, soldering, hammering, chiselling. The barn is real enough. It was built in around 1700 for a farm in Hampshire and relocated 40 years ago to the Weald and Downland Living Museum in West Sussex, where the series is filmed. But as real barns go, the Repair Shop is unusually smart, its wooden frame robust, its reed-thatch immaculate, and its interior beautifully lit. There is a slight suggestion of Hansel and Gretel or even Wagner. Something mythic. The barn sits among trees. No cars or roads can be seen. Customers, three or four of them to every episode, walk like pilgrims along stony paths that wind to the front door, where they show their broken keepsakes to the workshop’s gaffer, Jay Blades, who wears heavy-rimmed spectacles and a distinctive (because permanent) cloth cap. The object is unwrapped and Blades, a cabinetmaker-cum-community worker by trade, summons one of the show’s specialists – a furniture restorer, say, or a soft-toy repairer – to advise on how it can be repaired. It might be an accordion that no longer squeezes, a rocking horse that no longer rocks, a ventriloquist’s dummy with its mouth clamped shut, a stained watercolour, a stopped clock, a half-wrecked liner made of matchsticks, a model locomotive minus three of its wheels. Britain has a cornucopia of damaged goods. After a diagnosis, the object is taken in, rather like a patient. Blades shakes hands with the customer and promises to see them soon. More sandpapering, stitching and soldering follows. Words are few. “Hi, Will, take a look at this,” says Jay. “Brilliant!” says Will. Nobody shows off; everyone behaves with dignity. This isn’t the real world. These dedicated artisans never break a promise, never say, “It’s 300 quid with VAT included but I’ll take 100 off if we’re talking cash.” Money never needs to be mentioned. The wages are paid by the production company (Ricochet, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers) that makes the series for the BBC. Nonetheless, in their reticence and friendship, the workers in The Repair Shop seem closer to ordinary life than the players in the average TV reality show. Or at least closer to ordinary life as some of us like to imagine it is – or was once and might be again – which is to say more collaborative than competitive, less selfish and less greedy. In Antiques Roadshow, the luckiest participants gasp when they’re told the value of what they hold in their hand. The Repair Shop’s customers are spiritual in comparison. “Amazing!” they say when the cloth is pulled from their refurbished heirloom. “How fine it looks. If only Uncle Bill could’ve seen it – he’d have been so pleased.” Wisely, the programme makers decided against a notion, raised at an early planning meeting, that the value of a piece would be estimated before and after restoration. Profit on the one hand and fond memories of Uncle Bill on the other (this was his stuffed crocodile, after all) don’t sit comfortably together. I like The Repair Shop. I like the shots of trees, pastures, ponds and birds that are spliced with the scenes inside the barn. I like the absence of cars, the light pizzicato on the soundtrack (a sure sign nothing bad can happen), the seductive artifice that has created William Morris’s utopia in West Sussex. Millions of us watch it. A show that began life early in 2017 as a series of cheap half-hours for BBC2’s daytime schedules now has a 60-minute slot during the evening peak on BBC1. More than 250 episodes of varying lengths have been made (some have still to be shown) and another 50 are at different stages of production. New episodes (there are many repeats) achieve average audiences of between 3 million and 4 million. The formula has been sold in half a dozen countries. “Really good stories, told cost-effectively” has been the basis of the sales pitch. We come to the business of crying. Another reason to like The Repair Shop is that nobody in the show, so far as I know, has asked the question that TV journalism currently finds irresistible. “How did you feel when … your cancer was diagnosed/your little daughter died/your house vanished in the tsunami?” The tears on this show come unprompted. Some customers are tearful and others not, which must also be true of the audience. In a September episode, Pamela from Devon arrived with a chipped, discoloured musical box in which almost no moving part worked. It looked like a souvenir from Venice, mid-20th century in style and attractive in its unabashed souvenir-ness. Pamela’s older sister, Vera, had been the original owner, until she died 50 years ago aged 15 after a long illness. The two girls had been close; for years they shared a bedroom. The music box was a reminder of her sister and the fun they’d had. The only reminder, in fact, because everything else of Vera’s had been destroyed in a terrible fire that gutted the house some time later. An awful tragedy had been revealed in few sentences. Two craftsmen, Will Kirk and Steve Kember, set to work on the box and restored it beautifully, so that when Pamela came back to the barn she could open the lid and hear Around the World in 80 Days. She said it was “amazing” and “incredible” and “thank you so much”, but thankfully she didn’t cry. There comes a point when tears can look like exploitation, both of the subject and her audience. When the great Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell read of the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, he is said to have thrown away the book in disgust, shouting, “You should not have killed her!” Dickens had been laying it on too thick. Television can do the same. Pamela didn’t cry, but I did. A capricious, wayward thing, crying, and never to be mistaken as a guarantee of sincerity or depth of feeling. A certain combination of music, words and images can bring it on. I cried at neither of my parents’ funerals, and yet I can cry at several points in It’s a Wonderful Life, not least in its last few moments, when James Stewart reads the inscription in the copy of Tom Sawyer that Clarence the Angel has given him: “Remember no man is a failure who has friends.” Clarence the Angel! Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been obliterated only eight months before Frank Capra began filming in 1946; Belsen had been liberated exactly a year before; as a bomber pilot, Stewart himself had been helping to flatten German cities as recently as 1944. Covid will probably cancel our seasonal excursion to see It’s a Wonderful Life this year, but The Repair Shop has a Christmas Special (unpromising phrase) on BBC1 next Friday. Common to both is the occasionally tearful pleasure of escapism in difficult times. Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist