There is a moment at the end of Blackadder Goes Forth that hardly needs explaining to anyone who has seen it.
After four series of absurdity, insults, turnips and cunning plans, the laughter disappears. Blackadder, Baldrick, George and Darling climb out of the trench and go over the top.
The picture slows. The battlefield disappears.
And eventually there is nothing but a field of poppies.
It is one of the most beautifully judged endings in British television.
It also wasn't supposed to look like that.
A mistake worth keeping
The scene they actually filmed didn't work particularly well.
The battlefield set was small. The actors had very little distance in which to charge before being shot, there was little opportunity for rehearsal and the raw footage simply didn't carry the weight the ending needed.
They had a problem.
What happened next is far more interesting than simply filming it again.
They looked at what they had.
Editor Chris Wadsworth slowed the footage dramatically. The awkwardness of the original take disappeared and the charge acquired a completely different weight. Director Richard Boden and the production team shaped the transition into the empty battlefield and then the poppy field. Howard Goodall's familiar Blackadder theme became something sparse and haunting on piano.
Something that hadn't worked became something extraordinary.
Not because the mistake itself was brilliant.
Because somebody recognised what could be made from it.
There is a watchmaker's lesson in that
Watchmaking is full of mistakes.
Anyone who tells you otherwise either hasn't spent very long at a bench or has an extraordinarily selective memory.
A screw escapes.
A spring decides to join the Swiss space programme.
A movement that behaved perfectly on the timegrapher develops an entirely different opinion once it is back on the wrist.
Occasionally you spend an unreasonable amount of time investigating a complicated problem before discovering that the answer is embarrassingly simple.
The skill isn't never getting something wrong.
It is learning what the mistake is telling you.
A mechanical watch is particularly unforgiving in that respect. Power begins at the mainspring and travels through the train of wheels until eventually it reaches the escapement.
If it doesn't get there, something happened along the way.
You don't throw the movement away.
You find out where the power stopped.
Seikosha
There is an old name that seems particularly appropriate here.
Seikosha.
In 1892, Kintaro Hattori established a factory in Tokyo and began producing wall clocks. He named it Seikosha to express his commitment to producing precise, exquisite clocks. Seiko itself renders Seiko-sha as the “House of Exquisite and Precision Manufacturing.”
I love that.
Because exquisite workmanship can sound as though it means perfection.
I don't think it does.
To me, craftsmanship is the process that happens between something being wrong and somebody making it right.
It is observation.
Adjustment.
Trying again.
Sometimes going backwards.
Sometimes discovering that the solution you were certain would work doesn't.
And occasionally finding something better precisely because the first idea failed.
The evidence is on the bench
Vintage watches make this particularly visible.
They have already survived somebody else's mistakes.
Perhaps several people's.
A watchmaker fifty years ago may have fitted a part differently. An owner may have knocked the case against a doorway. Another watchmaker may have left a tiny mark beside a screw. A dial may have changed colour because moisture found its way inside decades before we ever saw it.
We could regard every one of those things simply as imperfections.
Sometimes they are.
But they are also evidence that the watch has had a life.
Our job isn't to erase that life and pretend the watch left the factory yesterday.
It is to understand what is in front of us, preserve what matters, correct what needs correcting and allow the watch to continue.
That is a very different idea from perfection.
Perhaps that is the point
The final scene of Blackadder Goes Forth wasn't beautiful because somebody planned every frame perfectly.
It became beautiful because something didn't work and somebody cared enough to keep looking at it.
There is a lesson in that which reaches rather further than television or watches.
Making mistakes is easy.
We all manage that.
The interesting part is what happens next.
At the bench, when a movement doesn't behave as expected, we don't get to argue with it. Somewhere between the barrel and the escapement is an answer.
So we look again.
We learn.
We adjust.
And sometimes, if we're fortunate, what comes out the other side is better than the thing we originally intended to make.
Perhaps exquisite workmanship was never about getting everything right the first time.
Perhaps it is about caring enough to get there in the end.