The Repair Shop star Jay Blades to explore his ‘toughest challenge’

The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades will confront his struggles to read in a new BBC One documentary.

He will star in Jay Blades: Learning To Read At 51, which explores his literacy problems.

Blades kept secret the fact he has the reading ability of a child until he was in his 30s and has tried ways to avoid the written word.

He left school with no qualifications and the hour-long film will explore how this has shaped him, the BBC said.

Blades will learn to read with a charity that organises volunteer coaches to work one-to-one with readers, using a system which was started in prisons, according to producers.

He will also help others in the same boat while looking back at key moments from his life that were impacted by his failure to read – including once finding a stranger in the street to decipher an important letter from the hospital.

Blades, who appears in the BBC’s heirloom restoration show The Repair Shop, said: “Learning to read is going to be the toughest challenge for me. On this journey I’ll be meeting people who can’t read, for whatever reason, and hopefully helping them.

“I’d love this film to inspire the millions of other adults in the same situation as me.”

In England, about seven million people can be described as having “very poor literacy skills,” according to the National Literacy Trust.