Repair Shop presenter Jay Blades is a shining example that anything is possible just six years after all but giving up on life with plans to end it all.
Now the restoration expert is a constant on the small screen, has found time to publish his own inspirational memoir and received an MBE for his services to craft.
He’s also got engaged to his long-term partner Lisa, and last, but not least, has learnt to read, aged 51.
Brought up by his single mother on a Hackney council estate, Blades left school at 15 with no qualifications and nothing to his name - except a reputation as a great fighter.
Until now he has dealt with his limited literacy, due to dyslexia, by requesting help from others. He once even accosted a stranger in the street to read him an important hospital letter.
“I’ve had to share everything with everybody!” he quips. “I just tell people, ‘Yeah, I can’t read, read this for me’. And they’re just like, ‘What?’ People find it amazing that somebody can’t read.
“It’s like not everybody is a David Beckham, not everybody can kick the ball and get it in the back of the net, it just doesn’t work like that. Some of us can’t do these things.”
His quest is to be documented in a one-off BBC One film, Jay Blades: Learning To Read At 51. So why now?
“I wanted to learn to read, for one,” and two, to inspire people. To get people like myself to then say, ‘I’m going to take the plunge’.
“But I jumped in at the deep end, like I do with most things, naively, not realising how hard it is.”
Blades explains “the letters are all ants, they keep on moving around, so you try and hold them down.
“It’s insane, I’m telling you,” reiterates the father-of-three, now based in Wolverhampton. “It gives you a headache. Imagine trying to see something that’s constantly moving.”
He gets by using coloured overlays (a plastic reading sheet tinted with colour and placed over text, that he describes as a “personal trainer for words”). Often used by dyslexics, it is not seen as an effective long-term treatment.
In the film, he learns to read with the support of the charity Read Easy UK, which organises volunteer coaches to work with readers, using a system started in prisons.
The lessons - shot over a period of six months - take him back to basics, from mastering the relationship between sounds and letters to eventually reciting words and sentences. His end goal: to read a book to his youngest daughter, Zola, 15, for the first time. Has he ever felt embarrassed by his struggles?
“Nah, I have too much confidence and a lot of naivety,” he answers, recalling the time he enrolled (“blagged a spot”) on a university course despite not being able to read the course materials.
It was during said course - a BA in Criminology and Philosophy at Buckinghamshire New University - that Blades, then 31, received his long-awaited dyslexia diagnosis.
“It was a relief,” he confides, having been told he had a reading age 11. “But it was also really nice to see that there was help out there.”
He’s not alone. When Blades visits a school during filming, he’s shocked to find the average pupil is behind by two months due to the pandemic, for those on free school meals it’s more like seven months.
“No-one expected this pandemic to have the effect it’s had,” he argues. “You’ve got people seven months behind in school. What are we doing about it?”
And he hopes others can be inspired, adding: “No matter where you are in life, no matter what you think you can’t achieve, there are people ready to support you - and it can take you places that you could never imagine.”
- Jay Blades: Learning To Read At 51 airs on BBC One on Wednesday January 26.
