REVIEW FIELD TEST
Television
he format for this Netflix show is
simple – take a group of glass-
blowers and, each episode, give
them a challenge and eliminate
whoever performs worst. This
format is particularly brutal because it
doesn’t give the competitors a chance to redeem
their mistakes – one false move and they’re out.
When working with glass, it’s easy for one false
move to result in the utter destruction of the piece
you’re working on. While this can happen at any
time, a particularly risky time is getting the piece off
the punty (a metal rod used to hold the glass as it’s
worked) and into the annealer (an oven that very
slowly cools down the glass to room temperature to
ensure that it doesn’t crack). It doesn’t matter how
well your glass is worked, if your tap to break it off
the punty is a little too hard, or you don’t hold it
properly, all you’ve made is a pile of broken glass.
There are parallels to the Great British Bake Off in
Blown Away, and the strongest of these parallels are
in the medium, rather than the structure of the
competition. Molten glass, like cake batter, is in a
constant state of flux. You can influence it, you can
work with it, but you can never really control it in the
same way you can with, say, metal or wood. It
doesn’t stay still, so once you’ve begun the process
of creation, you’re thrust into a stream of work that
it’s hard to stop or pause, until you’ve gone all the
way through to a finished product in the annealer.
Blown Away is an entertaining watch in its own
right, and we enjoyed getting an insight into the
process of glass-making, but we would have
preferred a slightly safer competition, where makers
were eliminated on the results of two or three
makes, rather than having just a single chance
each episode.Blown Away
VERDICT
Great
entertainment
and some truly
impressive builds.9 / 10
By Ben Everard @ben_everardT