The Great Pottery Throw-Down has been pitched more and more, recently, as 'the successor to Great British Bakeoff". The format is the same, but in terms of spiritual successor as a mass media phenomenon, it has not yet gotten there. This all changed with the current season (S5), which is posting absolutely record viewership numbers and is farm more popular internationally than seasons 1-4.
Instead of reviewing the show, or waxing lyrical about the fact that I also work with ceramics and am a potter, and the incredible depth and genuine challenge posed in each episode, I want to discuss seasons 1-4 comparatively so that you know which ones to care about.
S1 of the show was really good. The hosts are Kate Malone, a ceramics artist, and Keith Brymer-Jones, a production potter and one of the blokiest blokes to ever bloke on television. the kiln man / studio technician (off-camera Ceramics Guy) is Rich Miller. The TV host is Sara Cox, a famous British drivetime radio host for the BBC.
Kate, Keith, and Rich are some of the strongest hosts in Bakeoff style television. Kate is strong, Keith is delicate, and Rich is an educator for the lay TV audience. S1 is very good.
In S2, the staff remains the same. The quality of the competitors, unfortunately, drops slightly. They selected more 'hand-builders' than in S1, a form of pottery that is disconnected from the throwing, pottery wheel based methods that every challenge is based on. As a result, you can tell who the first four people to be eliminated will be; the edit makes abundantly clear that they don't even deserve to be here. An episode 2/3 hand-building challenge could have changed that; instead, the first third of the season acts as a dumb joke for any potter watching.
In S3, Sara Cox is replaced as TV Host by Mel Sykes, who succeeded well in the TV Host role on Bakeoff. Unfortunately, as I'll discuss in a second, I hate this one. The quality of the competitors is excellent, the challenges are great, and Keith is at his zenith as 'bloke who cries on television when he sees art'. In either s2 or s3 Kate is replaced as host , presumably because she was too expensive to keep booking.
(Keith is an emotional man who truly loves pottery. In recent seasons, his existing tendency to be moved - to the point of tears - when he sees ceramics he admires has become, sort of, the 'Paul Hollywood handshake', the acknowledgement for the viewing audience at home that a technical skill has been truly well presented to a technical judge. I feel that S4 was the worst for the edit room selecting every single clip where he is moved to this extent; it felt almost like self-parody to me. I'm glad to see that S5 is less obnoxious on this front.)
That said, S3 is 'the brexit season', and I hate it. The show moved from the BBC to Channel Four, and stopped casting people of colour in favour of instead casting 'european ethnics'; the show gets a LOT whiter this season and a LOT more brexit-ish, in ways that I think hinder far more than they help the thesis of the show, or the idea of pottery television.
S4 (2020) has excellent contestants. Their technical skills are solid. Mel Sykes couldn't be part of the cast and crew bubble required by COVID-19, and is replaced by Siobhán McSweeney, whom you may remember as 'Sister Michael' from TV comedy Derry Girls. S4 also sees Rich Miller promoted to Keith's foil as second judge, and replaced by a new 'kiln girl', Rose Schmits, a trans woman who does not pass as cis. In my opinion, S4's casting (Rich, who is black, becoming a host - and he's GREAT at it; Rose as "kiln girl" in a deliberate attempt to piss off transphobes) repudiates the 'brexit season' of S3.
S5, currently airing, may be the best season yet. You owe it to yourself, if you like this sort of show, to check this one out. Comedian Ellie Taylor replaces Siobhán, and she's good. Keith is there. Rich is there. Rose is there. The show finally is willing to pay for the correct hosting team, and they've found it.