I’ve waited all my life to land a TV presenting job and Drawers Off is just in time for the last days of lockdown

Four months ago I was filing my weekly column from the 17th floor of a Manchester hotel, looking down on a city in lockdown and being handed an airline-style breakfast from reception rather than hogging the usual buffet.

I was up in the city filming a 20-part TV series for Channel 4, a glorious break from sitting at home trying to write and fretting about ever setting foot on a stage again. The stand-up show I was supposed to be touring had obviously been postponed, taking with it the majority of my annual income, so getting some telly work meant a great deal to me – financially, professionally and emotionally.

I am a show-off by nature and there I was at the age of 60 in the middle of a pandemic being handed my first very own TV presenting gig. I couldn’t have been more grateful. In the past I’ve struggled to find my TV niche: I’ve dabbled with disastrous sitcoms, managed two series of my own chat show back in the Nineties on Channel 5 (no, I can’t remember it either) and came tantalisingly close to nabbing the Bake Off gig when Sandi Toksvig left in 2019. I feel I’ve waited a long time for Drawers Off – the “life drawing with a twist” TV show.

For years I’ve been pitching art shows to TV companies, but no one was interested. People apparently liked watching people cook but not draw. But fashions change, especially in telly land, and these days art shows are among some of the big ratings hitters on the box, with (in my opinion) Grayson Perry’s sublime Art Club leading the pack right now. Other favourites include The Great Pottery Throw Down, Sky’s Artist of the Year programmes, Interior Design Masters and Netflix’s madly satisfying Blown Away, which features competitive glass blowing and is as brilliantly bonkers as it sounds.

Drawers Off is unashamedly at the less serious end of the art spectrum. It features five amateur artists who take it in turn to sit on both sides of the canvas as they compete over five consecutive days to win a cash prize. Obviously, being an early evening show, the nudity is very discrete with a lot of careful positioning and draping. My aim is to wean every nursing home in the land away from the quiz shows and over to the art side, so we don’t want anything that is going on to frighten, offend or overexcite anyone. Apologies to the voyeurs, this is probably a lot tamer than you were hoping for, but tough.

The reaction has been mostly positive, in some respects I’m glad most of my TV disasters and experimental failures happened before social media really existed. Back then, if someone hated anything you did there was a review in the paper and the next day your shame was in the bin. Now everything is online, the stains on your career are harder to get rid of, but we all have them and the only person apt to be trawling for poisonous comments about your work at 1am is you. As my mother frequently told me, “No one else is that interested in you, Jenny.” She was right.

I think the only criticism that stings is anything that comes from people who are themselves involved in the art world. I’m talking about the type of people who claim to be big fans of “art for all” and yet can’t hack the sight of people with less experience/talent than they have having a go. How dare they?

“Why can’t they be properly taught before they paint on the telly?” comes the cry. Possibly because they have jobs, busy lives and kids to put first.

For most of our contestants, art isn’t their full-time occupation, it’s their hobby, their therapy, their release. Some have only taken up painting since the pandemic began. There is a contestant getting over a serious illness, others distracting themselves from careers put on hold thanks to the virus, and those who have decided later in life to attempt something they’ve never been “allowed” to do before. Once upon a terrible time, certain types of boys’ schools actively discouraged their pupils from having an artistic bent and it’s only on retirement these chaps are free to let rip.

At a time when art is helping people around the country to get through the long last days of lockdown, it seems particularly joyless to heap scorn on a daytime telly show which, with all the best will in the world, is not designed with art snobs in mind.

As Grayson and Philippa Perry’s show demonstrates so beautifully, art is about communicating, and whilst some people are more skilled than others, that shouldn’t put the rest of us off having a go.

If Drawers Off gets people painting, then our job is done. Oh yes, and it’s OK to laugh at the occasional disasters. Let’s face it, we all love it when the cookie crumbles on the cooking shows. Laughing is cool, sneering isn’t.

Drawers Off airs on Channel 4 on Mondays at 5.30pm