WOOD working classes at a local school proved the first step towards a place on a primetime TV competition show.
Ashley Turner, who was inspired by her late father to become a joiner, is a contestant on the new series of Handmade, Britain's Best Woodworker on Channel 4.
Ashley father died when she was five and she grew up wanting to be like him. She has dyslexia and struggled at school, but excelled in woodwork at The Winston Churchill School.
“It’s all I have wanted to do since I was about 12. I worked really hard at it because it was something I knew,” Ashley said.
After leaving the school in St John’s, Ashley took a joinery apprenticeship in Lightwater, with day releases to her father’s former college in Guildford.
After her apprenticeship, she worked as a joiner on large items in huge workshops and left for an office job when she married and planned to have children.
Last year, Ashley watched the first series of Handmade, Britain's Best Woodworker.
![](https://www.wokingnewsandmail.co.uk/tindle-static/image/2022/11/26/10/2022-09-p1-Britains-Best-Woodworker-3.jpg?width=669&height=445&crop=669:445)
“I thought, ‘I can do that’ even though I hadn’t done woodwork for 10 years,” she said.
Ashley applied to be on the current series and got through the various stages, but when she was booked for a phone interview, she had to scramble to be ready.
“I’d just moved house and didn’t have a workshop, so I had to put a load of time and energy into getting myself ready and getting my workshop built,” she said.
Ashley was chosen as a contestant and said she thoroughly enjoyed being on the programme but is not allowed to say how she got on.
It is a woodwork version of The Great British Bake Off. Last series, the contestants’ work was judged by Alex De Rijke, an architect, and Helen Welch, who founded The London School of Furniture Making. This year, they have two new judges to impress – design academic Tom Dyckhoff and entrepreneur and woodworking expert Sophie Sellu.
Each week one contestant is eliminated from the competition, with an overall winner chosen on the last programme of the series.
![](https://www.wokingnewsandmail.co.uk/tindle-static/image/2022/11/26/10/2022-09-p1-Britains-Best-Woodworker-2.jpg?width=669&height=445&crop=669:445)
Ashley said that, despite her long pause from woodwork, she soon got back into it on the show.
“It’s like muscle memory. A chisel is our version of a chef’s knife and it’s kind of imprinted in your hand; how you hold it, how you’re supposed to hit it against the wood.
“Working to precision is ingrained in me through being trained in an apprenticeship.”
Ashley said being in front of cameras didn’t worry her, partly because the work was intense and also because of the presenter, Mel Giedroyc, who also presented Bake Off before it moved from BBC to Channel 4.
“She was amazing: super motherly and really helpful. She helped me get myself settled in. She’s so funny and really intelligent.”
While her mother still lives locally, Ashley now lives in her husband’s home county of Lancashire. Being on the programme has inspired Ashley to plan to sell small woodwork items made in her workshop at her home in Chorley.
“I now look at my dyslexia as a blessing in disguise,” she said.
“I’ve never met someone who was dyslexic who was not really skilled and really creative at something.”