![]() ![]() ![]() The contestants are allocated stations alongside each other, even sharing tools, in order to provide the audience with a lab scientist’s view of their interactions and to increase the probability of personality clashes. To ‘turn up the heat’, each task has to be completed within an arbitrary time limit of between four and eight hours. The process of elimination continues until the showdown between the two survivors in Episode 10. The sculptures are presented to the judges at the end of each round one contestant is eliminated, on the grounds that he or she ‘did not blow away’, and one is crowned ‘best in blow’. Each episode, they are challenged to make a glass sculpture in response to a brief, with the aid of assistants whose role is sadly but inevitably underplayed. The premise is that an initial cohort of ten ‘exceptional artists’ are gathered in ‘North America’s biggest hot shop’, a purpose-built workshop in Hamilton, Ontario. ![]() But the unusual subject matter gives it a dimension of cultural interest not to be found in Love Island or The Great British Bake Off. The programme is certainly addictive television, employing the standard artifices of its genre: an emotive soundtrack, a hyperbolical voiceover, absurdly competitive participants, and the prospect of a single, ‘life-changing’ prize. The creators of Blown Away, released on Netflix this July, have set out to turn the aesthetic spectacle of glassmaking into a reality TV competition. There is something hypnotic about watching a skilled glassmaker moulding his fiery material at blisteringly high temperatures, blowing white-hot bubbles through a metal tube, or weaving long canes into intricate nets before they harden and snap. With glass as with few other art forms, it is not just the final product that catches the eye, but the process of making it. ![]()
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