It’s probably not the greatest, most productive skill to be proud of, but my ability to watch hours and hours of TV was always something that, I felt, set me apart from other people. At my peak, if you can call it that, I thought nothing of spending six, seven hours with the same show. I once devoured an entire series of 24 on DVD in one sitting, and consumed all 86 episodes of The Sopranos in 13 days. In my defence, with the latter, I had just been made redundant and had nothing better to do. Plus, it made staying in my dressing gown all day look like cosplay, rather than mild depression.

I always had other hobbies, and I’ve always enjoyed going outside, but if I set my mind to TV, that’s what I did without much thought for anything else.

I turned this to my advantage in later years, too, writing about TV for the first eight or nine years of my working life, and I still dip in every now and again. But in the past couple of years, I’ve noticed my concentration span disappear. Perhaps it’s guilt catching up with me for all the years I spent slack-jawed on the sofa letting yet another box set of forgettable US TV wash over me? Or maybe I’m distracted by worry – about everything from the climate crisis to the feeling I should be doing something better with my time?

I don’t think it takes a psychiatrist to work out why I might not be able to concentrate at the moment, but even before the whole global pandemic thing, I couldn’t really focus on TV. I’ve got stuff to do; too much tension makes my chest tight; too much shouting sets my teeth on edge. Needless to say, news and current affairs are off the menu, and on it are The Repair Shop, Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing and not much else. “How slow can you go?” I seem to be asking my television.

I’ve tried documentaries, wondering if it was more realism I craved, but this coincided with a trend for genuinely staggering factual series about almost unbelievable events. Making a Murderer, Wild Wild Country, The Keepers, The Staircase, you know, all those. “Try Tiger King,” is the latest advice from friends trying to suggest something to watch during the lockdown. “It’s absolutely crazy,” they say.

A global pandemic that has left thousands dead and threatens the very fabric of society is about as much crazy as I can deal with this month, thank you. Some guy with a big cat will have to wait, no matter how daft his mullet is.

Thankfully, I have found a few things to watch. Given how much Wheeler Dealers, How It’s Made and The New Yankee Workshop I used to sit through on Discovery Shed, it’s hardly a surprise to me, but most of my viewing now revolves around the restoration of old things. I stumbled upon this new world during a break on a night shift at this very paper last year. I’m not sure why it spoke to me the way it did, but as soon as I saw this film of the restoration of a seized 1960s chainsaw, I knew it was the only thing I wanted to watch. And with 10m views, I’m far from the only person to enjoy this 38-minute slice of nerdy bliss. Thank you, Will Matthews, I owe you.

From there, I fell down a tool-restoration rabbit hole. King among them is My Mechanics, a YouTube channel with about 1.3 million subscribers and more than 123m views. He – I assume he’s a he, you only see a pair of hands in the videos and there’s no talking – is based in Switzerland. And that’s about all the information there is. Where does he get the projects from? How has he mastered working with so many materials? Who paid for all those amazing tools? Does he have a day job? Why doesn’t he fix the broken button on his sandblasting machine? Many questions, but I don’t care about the answers, really, I just sit back and watch another video. At least I did – I’ve now seen them all, several times, and eagerly await the next. One was uploaded this week, thankfully, the restoration of a barn find oil lamp, and it’s perfect.

If watching someone restore an old Game Boy or PlayStation sounds more your thing, then Odd Tinkering is the channel for you. Who knew 1980s plastic could be bleached and exposed to UV light to come up looking like new?

StewMac, the video channel of luthier supply company Stewart MacDonald, is another source of endless fascination (for me, at least) and sits perfectly at the intersection of what now appears to be my two main interests – restoration videos and guitars. If you can’t marvel as Dan Erlewine masterfully restores a butchered 1953 Fender Telecaster, or replaces a mother-of-pearl inlay in the neck of a Martin D-45, then I can’t help you.

Of course, there is a temptation to analyse this viewing in a way that makes it seem philosophically pure, that in witnessing the restoration of an item that would otherwise be thrown on the scrapheap, that I’m somehow making a stand against consumerism and the disposability of life in the 21st century.

Maybe that’s true, but really, I just like seeing rusty old bits of metal get a once-over with a sandblaster.