The Great Pottery Throw Down is midway through its ninth series on Channel 4, with the 2026 run that began in January scheduled to conclude on 8 March 2026. Siobhán McSweeney returns as host, with the judging bench once again shared by Keith Brymer Jones and Rich Miller — the lineup that has carried the programme since its Channel 4 revival and turned a Sunday-night baking format into the most visible shop window British ceramics has.
The format remains what audiences know: twelve home potters face weekly challenges that move from cylinders to hand-built showpieces, with the judges assessing technique and nerve. The programme's origins stretch back to 2015, when it first aired on BBC Two before moving to Channel 4 in 2020; each successive series has fed a measurable appetite for clay that studios across the country report in waiting lists for wheel classes.
For working potters, the show's power is not the prize but the demonstration. Viewers watch centring fail and succeed, see glaze chemistry behave and misbehave, and hear crackle explained by makers who spend their working lives at the wheel. The tension between a decorative challenge and a functional brief — a teapot that must pour — is the discipline of the craft made visible, per the programme's long-running approach to its challenges. crafts news coverage.
A casting call for the next series has already circulated through pottery networks, meaning the pipeline of home potters turned television contestants continues, an appetite for making on screen that craft programming has ridden for a decade. Series nine continues on Channel 4, with the final scheduled for 8 March 2026.
