TV review: Give RTÉ's Making a watch - it will make you wonder

Prepare to be mesmerised by a Japanese guy talking about the the difference between seeing with your eyes and touching with your hands

Joe Walsh in Making

I like a bit of slow telly. I don’t mean those point-of-view videos where you are on a sled in the Tundra, because watching that sort of carry on for more than five minutes is a sign that your life is grinding to a halt.

By slow telly, I mean proper immersive TV that isn’t about fake peaks and narratives and twists. I mean a short gentle view into a parallel world, that slows down my brain so I can learn something new. Making  (RTÉ One and RTÉ Player) is just the show.

It’s based on the Making In event, an annual gathering of makers in Joseph Walsh’s studio in Fartha, near Belgooly, in Cork. I hadn’t heard the word makers before. From what I can make out, a Maker is a Handy Artist. So they’re making a work of art that involves a good bit of manual labour. I’d say a Maker wouldn’t just build you a house – they’d build you an amazing one.

This show is a must watch for anyone interested in creativity. As one Italian maker says, “Art needs to to found, to be dug out, art needs to be discovered. It doesn’t just appear.”

What I liked most about the show is I could understand what everyone was trying to say. Some of these things can feature people that are a lot up their own arse, but everyone has their feet on the ground, making something meaningful. As one fiddle player says, he is no different to a brick-layer.

The main project this year is a stone building that looks a bit like a country chapel. Watching them hack away at the local stone for a minute was a new kind of soothing and reminded me of Hands, an RTÉ show about traditional Irish crafts in the 1980s. I can still remember one about a guy making a boat.

It was one of the few shows I could watch with my parents, it calmed us all down. This Making will do the same for you.

There are makers from Italy, France, Finland and Japan here, with their one angle on how a stone building should look in field. But this is art where the execution is more important than the idea.

I was mesmerised by a Japanese guy talking about the the difference between seeing with your eyes and touching with your hands. Seeing is an intellectual exercise, you try and make sense of it. But touching, as he put it, “touches your heart directly.”

The stone building at the end is a triumph. It will make you wonder. So will Making. Give it a watch.