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In The Game of Wool, Channel 4’s quest to find Britain’s best knitter, you can’t take your eyes off Tom Daley’s outfits. One of his goals for the series, he says, is that “what I was wearing would get progressively more interesting”, which is ridiculous because in the very first episode he’s wearing a vivid, asymmetrical shawl that in some places reaches the floor, and he looks like a wizard who might seem chaotic but is actually very powerful.
“Sheila [Greenwell, one of two judges, along with Di Gilpin] made that for La Fetiche,” he says, referring to the avant garde house of knitwear. “Later on I wear some stuff by Hope Macaulay, a Northern Irish textiles designer, then Boy Kloves, right out of Central Saint Martins, then towards the end, two archival Stella McCartney looks.”
It’s not his first modelling rodeo, because who could forget the Gillette campaign last year, which is where many of us first learned the phrase “thirst trap”? But no question, it’s novel to see him wearing so many clothes. He loves being a “blank canvas”, but isn’t considering a second act as a model: “I think I’ve missed the boat – I’m 31.” Elite athletes have bizarre, truncated careers, even the ones who aren’t divers (yes, that is a “trunks” joke, thank you for noticing). But Daley is ready for his next act.
Before we get to the wool, fresh in our minds, of course, is Celebrity Traitors, in which he was brutally “murdered” very early on in a tactical move by the traitors to put the heat on Kate Garraway. “They got rid of people who probably would have figured it out,” he says, not even mock grimly, with an athlete’s chagrin that he didn’t medal.
It must be painful to watch the other faithfuls be so rubbish at it, I suggest. Frankly, it was vexing from the start. “Around that first round table, you’re either waiting to be touched or not wanting to be touched. It’s really intense. When I wasn’t a traitor, I was annoyed. You can think, ‘Just play the game and have fun and see where we get.’ But as an athlete, I like to be in control.”
He’d also been looking forward to smashing the challenges. “As a viewer, you’re thinking, ‘I don’t really need to see all this.’ But as a participant I wanted to be jumping out of helicopters.” Instead he has had to watch from an armchair while his fellow faithfuls run really slowly and have conniptions when they get sprayed with water. It must be maddening, which would indeed explain this idea: “I think what they should have considered is a resurrection. Bringing someone back from the dead after, like, the first four murders.” Did he suggest that to the producers? “Yes. They said no.”
I found The Game of Wool brutal to watch in a different way. Its contours are familiar: 10 contestants, at close quarters, knitting competitively under intolerable time pressure, getting picked off by the judges one by one. It sounds like Bake Off, but knitters are different; they’re sensitive. Holger, a German tailor, is painfully perfectionist and feels each necessary sloppy patch-up job like a blow. Meadow and Isaac point blank refuse to hug anything out. Dipti cries when she sees a dog. Ailsa is so into the story of wool, reaching back through centuries, that you worry she’ll reach the end of the thread one day, and have a terrible moment of “is that it?” Simon, a former soldier turned construction worker, is so people-pleasing you want King Charles to send him a telegram or something: “Relax, everyone already likes you.”
Stephanie has a passion for Chelsea pensioners, but off screen, “the thing that she’s known for making is anatomically correct vulvas”. Why does she make those, I ask, the possibilities unfurling endlessly. (Sexual awakening workshops? Gynaecologist training? Corsage for lesbian wedding?) “That’s the amazing thing about knitting and crochet,” says Daley. “If you put your mind to making something, if you can see it, imagine it, you can make it.” Yes, sure, but why? “I can’t pretend to know why.”
All the contestants are too pure for this world, which is maybe what drew them to knitting in the first place. It is, paradoxically, very stressful to watch. Yet Daley, who took up knitting just before lockdown because his coach said he had to find a hobby that didn’t involve rushing around all weekend, makes such a strong case for it that I ended up buying his first book, Made with Love, about the basics of knitting and crochet.
When I meet him in central London, Daley has flown in that morning from Los Angeles, where he lives with his husband, the screenwriter and producer Dustin Lance Black, and their two sons, Robbie, who’s seven, and Phoenix, who’s two and a half. Daley doesn’t get jet lag because he doesn’t have time, he says, and the energy comes off him like steam – you can almost see it. He used to bite his nails, and he couldn’t sit still, but craft has solved all that.
He started off making a scarf for his mum, and before too long he’d made a wool chandelier. I asked what Black thought about that. “He said, ‘Only you could take something that I suggested as a hobby and make it into something bigger than a hobby.’” It’s no joke, marrying an Olympian, but I was thinking specifically about the chandelier. You start off married to one kind of person, and suddenly they’re festooning your fittings with wool: it’s got to be an adjustment? “Oh, the chandelier was his idea.”
Sorry to harp on – and this is my fixation, Tom Daley is too seasoned in the world of contest to ruminate on Traitors – but didn’t it also annoy him, after he’d been murdered, when they used his diving career as a quiz question and got the answer wrong themselves? The group were asked how many dives he’d done in his Olympic career, 96 or 102. “It’s actually 97, because I did a re-dive in London 2012. It’s a question that comes up in pub quizzes because it catches people off guard.” He won’t admit to actual annoyance, but he definitely noticed.
After the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which of course were held the following year, because of Covid), Daley retired in his head, but didn’t say so publicly. He took two years off, then un-retired himself to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics, having realised he wasn’t ready to stop. He took silver in the synchronised 10 metre event, adding a fifth medal to the gold and three bronzes he already had – a record for a British diver – and then accidentally left it in the Olympic village. It had to be sent on after him when he went home. He’s so incredibly competitive, you can imagine him doing that in subconscious protest that it was the wrong colour.
He already lived in the US by then – it was an obvious decision, since his husband is American and they had lived in London for the first 10 years of their relationship. But it’s also a vexed decision, in the Trump era, and “it’s just for now, anyway; we’ll see what happens with democracy”. They wanted to get their sons settled in time for elementary school. Robbie isn’t into sport, he’s into Lego and playing the drums, which is fine. Phoenix is the sporty one, “but we took him to his first swimming lesson, and, of course, it was my child that refused to get into the water”. Daley is relaxed about neither child becoming a diver, world-class or any other kind, but they do have to learn to swim. “It’s really important for children. Come on. It’s California.”
It remains plain weird for him not to be a diver any more: “I’ve been an athlete since I was seven years old. There’s always been a goal to strive for. There’s nothing like a sporting goal.” He has no shortage of ideas: he wants to produce TV, and is working up projects with his husband’s counsel (Black has been making films for 25 years). But he’s pretty fixed on bringing knitting back to the masses, getting kids to sit still and be off their phones, and bringing the calm of repetitive action to a world of frazzled adults.
“I think people will be surprised by the nostalgia, and how much it means to someone when you give them something handmade,” he says. He wants to start a YouTube channel showing people how to do the basics, working up to the trickier manoeuvres, the chandeliers. Is he going to be like the Joe Wicks of wool? “Yes,” he says with finality. “I’m going to be Joe Sticks.”
