All That Glitters: Britain's Next Jewellery Star: Chains and Brooches

April 20, 2021 4:08 PM - Season 1, Episode 2

All That Glitters week 2: chains and broaches! The jewellers are tasked first with forming interlocking chain necklaces, and then with creating a "sweetheart brooch" for a woman in the Royal Army going on tour.
posted by Anonymous (6 comments total)

Whether or not they actually met the brief, those necklaces were very pretty. I especially liked Lee's so I'm glad to see he hung in there.

I think Tamara's brooch had the best design but Hugo's was definitely the most refined and skilled. I was sort of disappointed with the designs of the brooches overall--everyone was extremely literal in their interpretations. Granted, brooches tend to be pretty literal items of jewelry, but "put a bird on it" is not exactly the height of creativity. Though maybe that's what the client wanted!

As soon as Dan said "I've never done this, how hard can it be" you knew something bad was going to happen.

With Kim leaving we learned that plinth light status does not determine safety. I guess it's more of a warning? That wasn't clear to me from the first episode. This is the sort of thing that would probably be ironed out in a second season. If they're not going to limit elimination to the people with their plinth lights off then I think they should get rid of that schtick entirely. It just adds unnecessary stress.

Can the jewelers hear the judge's comments when they're reviewing pieces after the Bespoke Challenge? Because it seems like they're in another room but then the camera shows them reacting.
posted by Anonymous at 4:21 PM on April 20, 2021

I don't get why they chose Kim, who seemed better this week than, say, Lee -- it feels like they don't like her style more than that she was worse than anyone else. (Looking at their instagram pages, the ones whose styles I like are Kim, Lee and Sonny.)

The judges and host are still not really gelling. And the rules aren't clear.
posted by jeather at 7:40 PM on April 20, 2021

Well, this was a whole lot better than last week's intro episode. We saw far more of the jewellery-making process and much less of Katharine Ryan, who seemed to have reined in her motormouth crudity.

I, too, was surprised Kim went home. Her chain was an actual chain, whereas several of the others ignored the brief and got away with it. Her brooch was also much nicer than Lee's. But her style isn't particularly modern or edgy, so that might have gone against her. I was very happy to see Tamara come back from the brink, and I thought her brooch was lovely and is the one I'd have chosen. Hugo's was beautifully crafted though, so I understand why he won, and his brooch did look lovely on its lucky recipient.
posted by essexjan at 2:23 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think they are judging on style and craftsmanship as much as whether the contestant stuck to the brief. I see where they're coming from with that, they don't want to send home a jeweler who they feel COULD have done well and whose piece they would've liked in another context--but a competition has to have some rules and they really should have sent home a contestant who didn't hit the brief. These things are always going to depend somewhat on the taste of the judges (in the Bake-Off, literally) but there has to be a set of universal standards. Again, the sort of thing that has been worked out in later seasons of similar shows.

I keep coming back to "oh, this gets fixed in later seasons" but it's because I've seen so dang many iterations and seasons of this type of show that I feel like there are patterns to how they evolve if given the chance. I think that is why I'm so forgiving of this one's problems, in the back of my head I'm thinking "typical first season issues!" instead of looking at it by itself.
posted by Anonymous at 6:25 AM on April 21, 2021

Meh, at this point many of the specific mistakes of this show are known first season errors that should have been caught in the planning, simply because there are so many iterations of this.

Both judges do quite modern work, and I suspect that will influence the judging. That said I didn't think Kim had the finesse to make it that much further, but she didn't need to be sent home early.
posted by jeather at 7:55 AM on April 21, 2021

The thing I found frustrating about this episode is that it seemed like the brief didn't matter much and may not have been well communicated to the jewelers. This hit both challenges, where there was disagreement on chain vs necklace and then on how necessary it was to include enamel. I'd thought enamel was a required element, but not everyone attempted it, and those who did were mostly dinged for not executing it well.
posted by Akhu at 8:18 AM on April 21, 2021