“One of the contestants makes broilers out of wool!” Tom Daley on his Knockout Knitting Show – and argues with the producers of Traitors | television

IIn Wool Game, Channel 4’s quest to find Britain’s best knitter, you can’t take your eyes off Tom Daley’s clothes. He says one of his goals for the series was that “what I was wearing would get progressively more interesting,” which is ironic because in the first episode he was wearing a lively, asymmetrical shawl that in places reached the floor, looking like a wizard who might look messy but is actually very powerful.

“Sheila [Greenwell, one of two judges, along with Di Gilpin] “I made it for La Fetiche,” he says, referring to the pioneering knitwear house. “Later on, I wore some things by Hope Macaulay, a textile designer from Northern Ireland, then Boy Kloves, straight from Central Saint Martins, and then towards the end, a couple of archival looks from Stella McCartney.”

It’s not his first fashion show, because who can forget last year’s Gillette campaign, which is where many of us first learned the phrase “thirst trap”? But it’s definitely refreshing to see him wearing so many clothes. He likes to be a “blank slate”, but isn’t considering a second role as a model: “I think I’ve missed the boat – I’m 31.” Elite athletes have strange, truncated careers, even those who aren’t divers (yes, that’s a “stumps” joke, thanks for noticing). But Dali is ready for his next job.

Before we get to the point, what’s still fresh in our mind of course is Celebrity Traitors, as he was brutally “killed off” very early on in a tactical move by traitors to put the spotlight on Kate Garraway. “They got rid of the people who might have found out,” he says, without even scoffing grimly, with the displeasure of an athlete that he didn’t get a medal.

I suggest that it must be painful to watch other believers go overboard. Honestly, it was awkward from the start. “Around that first round table, you’re either waiting to be touched or you don’t want to be touched. It’s really stressful. When I wasn’t cheating, I was upset. You can think, ‘Just play the game, have fun and see where we go.’ But as an athlete, I like to be in control.”

He was also looking forward to smashing challenges. “As a viewer, you’re thinking: ‘I don’t really need to see all of this.'” But as a participant, I wanted to jump out of helicopters. Instead, he had to watch from an armchair as his fellow believers ran very slowly and convulsed when they were splashed with water. This must be crazy, which actually explains this idea: “I think what they should have been thinking about was resurrection. Bringing someone back from the dead after the first four murders, for example.” Did he suggest this to the producers? “Yes. They said no.”

I found The Game of Wool difficult to watch in a different way. Its features are familiar: 10 contestants, closely spaced, knitting competitively under unbearable time pressure, being selected by the judges one by one. It’s like Bake Off, but knitting is different; They are sensitive. Holger, a German tailor, is a painful perfectionist and feels every dirty patchwork job is as necessary as a blow. Mido and Isaac refuse to embrace anything. Deepti cries when she sees a dog. Elsa is so interested in the story of the Fleece, which goes back centuries, that you worry that one day she’ll reach the end of the thread and have a terrible moment of “Is this him?” Simon, an ex-soldier turned builder, is so people-pleasing that you want King Charles to send him a telegram or something: “Calm down, everyone really likes you.”

Stephanie has a passion for Chelsea pensioners, but off screen, “the thing she’s best known for making is anatomically correct vulvas.” I ask her why she makes these possibilities unfold endlessly. (Workshops on sexual awakening? Gynecologist training? A corset for lesbian weddings?) “That’s the amazing thing about knitting and crochet,” Daly says. “If you put your mind to making something, if you can see it and imagine it, you can make it happen.” Yes definitely, but why? “I can’t pretend to know why.”

All of the contestants are too pure for this world, which is probably what attracted them to knitting in the first place. Ironically, it’s very exhausting to watch. However, Daly, who started knitting just before lockdown because his coach said he had to find a hobby that didn’t involve rushing around all weekend, makes a strong case so I ended up buying his first book, Made with Love, about the basics of knitting and crochet.

When I met him in central London, Daly had flown in that morning from Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, screenwriter and producer Dustin Lance Black, and their two sons, Robbie, seven, and Phoenix, two and a half. Daly says he doesn’t have jet lag because he doesn’t have the time, and the energy emanates from him like steam — you can almost see it. He used to bite his nails, and he couldn’t sit still, but crafting solved all that.

He began by making a scarf for his mother, and before long he made a wool chandelier. I asked what Black thought about that. “Only you can take something I suggested as a hobby and turn it into something bigger than just a hobby,” he said. Marrying an Olympian is no joke, but I was specifically thinking about the Pleiades. You start marrying one type of person, and suddenly they’re lining your clothes with wool: does that have to be an adjustment? “Oh, the chandelier was his idea.”

Sorry to harp on – and this is my concern, Tom Daley is too seasoned in the competitive world to regurgitate traitors – but didn’t it also bother him when, after his murder, they used his diving career as a test question and got the answer wrong themselves? The group was asked how many dives he had done during his Olympic career, 96 or 102. “It’s actually 97, because I re-dived at London 2012. It’s a question that comes up in pub quizzes because it surprises people.” He wouldn’t admit to actual discomfort, but he definitely noticed it.

After the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which of course took place the following year, due to Covid), Dali retired in his head, but did not say so publicly. He took two years off, then decided to retire to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics, after realizing he wasn’t ready to stop. He took silver in the 10m synchro, adding a fifth to the gold and three bronze medals he already owned – a record for a British diver – which he then accidentally left behind in the Olympic Village. It had to be sent after him when he got home. He’s incredibly competitive, you can imagine him doing this in protest of his unawareness that the color is wrong.

He was already living in the US at the time – it was an obvious decision, given that his husband is American and they had lived in London for the first ten years of their relationship. But it’s also a puzzling decision, in the era of Trump, and “it’s just for now, anyway; we’ll see what happens with democracy.” They wanted their children settled in time to go to primary school. Robbie doesn’t like sports, he likes Lego and plays the drums, which is good. Phoenix is ​​the sporty one, “but we took him to his first swimming lesson, and of course it was my baby who refused to get in the water.” Daly isn’t comfortable with no kid becoming a diver, world-class or any other type, but they have to learn to swim. “It’s really important for kids. Come on. It is.” ca.“

It remains strange for him not to be a diver anymore: “I have been an athlete since I was seven years old. There has always been a goal to strive for. There is no such thing as a sporting goal.” He has no shortage of ideas: he wants to produce TV shows, and is working on projects in collaboration with his wife’s advisor (Black has been making films for 25 years). But he’s very determined to bring knitting back to the masses, get kids to sit still and stay away from their phones, and bring the peace of repetitive work to a world of weary adults.

“I think people will be surprised by the nostalgia, and how important it is to give someone something handmade,” he says. He wants to create a YouTube channel that shows people how to do the basics, and work on the more difficult maneuvers, the chandeliers. Will it be like Joe Wicks Wool? “Yes,” he says definitively. “I’ll be Joe Sticks.”