Great Pottery Throw Down judge Keith Brymer Jones looks back: ‘Men like seeing me be emotional’ | Family

Born in London in 1965, Keith Brymer Jones is a potter, ceramic designer and TV judge. After a stint as lead singer of the punk band the Wigs, he became an apprentice at Harefield Pottery in London. He went on to set up his own company, and created pots and homewares for retailers including Conran, Habitat and Laura Ashley, before developing his signature Word range. He has been a judge on The Great Pottery Throw Down since it started in 2015. His new book, Firing Earth: An Unexpected History of Pots and Potters, is published on 22 October.

This photo was taken in our family home in Finchley. Socks, shorts and a T-shirt was my usual outfit for scabbing around in the garden aged 11. I was a complete and utter square.

My main passion at this time was dancing – ballet, tap and Highland and Scottish country dancing. But I was starting to realise I should stop telling people about it. I was about to embark on my first year of secondary school at St Mary’s in Hendon and knew I’d get stick for it.

I kept it under wraps, but I was bullied for three years. It was the start of a difficult part of my life, especially after my grandfather died. His death happened in front of me, when he fell down the stairs while having a heart attack. Unsurprisingly, my OCD developed around this time; I used it to try to create a sense of control and order. Everything around me had to be at 90 degrees – pens, pencils and the curtains. My bedroom began to resemble an empty studio, because it was easier than having belongings. To this day, I do like a tidy workshop.

Although starting secondary school was traumatic, 11 was also the age I discovered clay. Back in the 80s, if you had dyslexia, you were considered thick, but as soon as I started to manipulate this material into shape, form and volume, I understood it. It felt like a religious calling – an epiphany – and it was the first time any teacher said I was good at something.

Very quickly, creativity became an obsession. I would stay in the art room during the lunch break and before and after school. Some of the bullies found out and put razor blades in the clay. I’d be throwing on the wheel and all of a sudden I’d feel a nick in the clay. At first I’d think it was a stone, but I’d look down and my hands were covered in cuts. Soon after that the teachers locked the door and gave me a key. By the time I was in sixth form, I would bunk off school to go to the V&A museum and spend the whole day looking at pots.

I grew up in a typical household for the time: my father went to work and my mother was a stay-at-home mum. She was a cookery teacher before they got married, and my sister and I would come home from school to find a piece of cake and a pint of milk waiting for us. Dad had a well-paid job as a head of a building society, but he hated it. Sport was his big thing. He once said to me in the car: “Whatever you do, Keith, make sure you do a job that you really love because you’ll be doing it for 85% of your life.” My sister was a high-achieving academic student, so my parents were a bit worried about where I might end up.

Much to their relief, shortly after I finished school I started my career as a clayboy at Harefield. I was a grafter, and by the end of my eight years there, I was head of production. This was also when I started to look like a bricklayer, because I used to have to shovel 10 tonnes of clay every two weeks. I was eating two lunches a day and five Mars bars just to keep the energy going. The owners were total anarchists who just happened to be potters.

When Harefield moved up to Inverness, I decided to set up my own studio in London. I wanted to make the best of it, and worked relentlessly. My largest ever order was a breakfast range for Habitat – 16,000 pieces that I made by hand. Some evenings I’d be cleaning my hands and I’d see a white mark and wonder what it was, only to realise it was the knuckle bone. It didn’t hurt, because it happened over time and I have a high pain threshold. When I did ballet, my father, who was also really practical, used to take me down to the garage and pull out my big toenails with a pair of pliers because I wanted to get a better point.

My path to ending up on TV happened in an unconventional way. One day Dom, my business partner, phoned up and said: “We should do a video like Adele’s for Rolling in the Deep – she’s in this old mansion and there’s all this broken crockery being smashed. My aunt’s got a mansion – we can do it there.” We rocked up, filmed a parody and the video went viral. It got into the hands of a woman who knew Richard McKerrow, the head honcho of Love Productions at the time, and happened to be looking into a new pottery format. She piped up and said: “Have a look at this cross‑dressing potter who’s done an Adele video.” He saw it and asked if I wanted to be a judge on The Great Pottery Throw Down.

I wasn’t convinced at first, as I know how long it takes to make a pot – 11 days, from start to finish. I was also adamant I didn’t want to make car-crash TV, where you’re just waiting for people to fail. But over a lot of wine, McKerrow convinced me to do it.

I had no idea I was going to be emotional on camera, but within 10 minutes of the first episode, it began. Someone was in trouble in the studio – I really felt for her, and started crying. In my earpiece, I heard one of the directors saying: “Fucking hell, one of the judges is crying. This is TV gold.” I still get a lot of messages from men who are grateful to see me being emotional. Even today I was walking past a building site and some bloke goes: “Oh, it’s that bloke that cries on the telly! Well done, mate!” I very rarely get any negative feedback about crying, because it’s honest.

These days, I have a strong sense of who I am and feel very comfortable in my own skin, but it took a while to get to that place. It all started after my mother died in my 20s. I had just set up my own studio, and because I was grieving and working so hard, I was getting panic attacks. I began bereavement counselling, and it was the first time I realised my emotional state could affect my physical state. Since then, I’ve had quite a bit of therapy and can finally feel confident in who I am. Something that boy, hiding his love of dancing, being a total square, couldn’t conceive of.