In the opening scene of Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51, the much-loved The Repair Shop host is holding a letter of congratulation on his MBE. “Can you read that?” asks his fiancée. “Yeah,” he says. “Because you’ve just read it to me. I can copy what you’ve said.”
He’s not reading it, he’s remembering it. It’s a coping strategy, something that people with neurodevelopmental disabilities often develop to pass as “normal”. In Blades’ case, his dyslexia was picked up only after he enrolled at university as a 31-year-old mature student. Reading and writing technologies helped him earn his degree in criminology and philosophy, but he still could not read afterwards. His assessment at the time as having a reading age of 11 seems to have been unduly generous.
TV presenters typically have to read scripts and notes to do their job, but Blades, as we see, has spent five years on The Repair Shop getting by being briefed by his producer and just talking to people who bring in their objects for repair because he can’t read any notes. He got by well enough that he didn’t have to tell anyone on the show for three years, but it’s a prodigious effort of verbal memory that he has to perform all the time.
Blades grew up on a Hackney council estate with a hard-working single mother who had come from Barbados, had no family support of her own and never read a book to him. The emotional hook of the documentary is that he wants to read a bedtime story to his daughter from his first marriage. But it’s to everyone’s credit that the documentary doesn’t shy from the nitty-gritty of dyslexia or the broader social drivers of illiteracy.
Blades goes into learning to read a capable and confident man; he professes to not be bothered, let alone humiliated, by the prospect of going right back to the basics he failed to learn first time around. And it really is back to basics: the Shannon Trust course he takes on is based on phonics and it seems like hard, mechanical work. (It also tends to suggest there’s a reason phonics fell out of favour in general education.) But there are elements that point to the neurological basis of his problem: for some reason – “no one knows why” – the letters are easier for him to decode with a coloured plastic filter laid over them.
He meets two fellow adult learners – one a middle-aged mother who has developed a kind of shorthand so she can write shopping lists – and visits a prison and a specialist school for kids like he was. He observes that about half of the residents of His Majesty’s prisons have a significant degree of reading impairment and listens as a teacher outlines the association between poverty and reading problems. Kids who qualify for free school meals read less well, and fell further behind during the pandemic.
Blades gradually picks up the basics in his lessons, though it’s evident that reading in a natural, interpretive voice is a separate challenge. But eventually he manages it and reads a storybook to his daughter over FaceTime.
It’s an emotional peak, though far from the only good moment in a documentary that has much to contemplate for those of us who can read naturally and those who do not.
JAY BLADES: LEARNING TO READ AT 51, TVNZ1, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12, 8.30pm; TVNZ+
