There's Nowt New...

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I've been watching a YouTube channel called Essential Craftsmen, where a guy 'reacts' [in the modern usage of the word] to assorted content centred around - you guessed it - craftsmen/women engaged in traditional woodworking practices throughout the world. His style and tone of delivery made me think of him as a kind of American version of that pioneer of crafts-content-watching/reacting: dear old Jack Hargreaves of UK TV fame in the sixties and seventies, in his TV show "Out of Town". The programme consisted of a series of short 16mm films to which Hargreaves would add narration, comment and anecdote from a studio set built to resemble a garden shed. His approach would doesn't look out of place on YouTube today, aside from the period production values and reproduction quality. Here he is in a episode on walking sticks and hurdle-making from I think the 1980s, on YouTube today. One thing that does mark these programmes out from the modern is the pacing and length of the thing: the start and end credits are an order of magnitude longer than a YouTube short apiece...

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