I expect to spend both Monday and Tuesday afternoon with a group of old sporting friends. Most of them I will never see again. The following week another crowd will be there instead – and they will not be spending time paying tribute to their predecessors.
If this sounds both brutal and poignant, that’s because it is. But then the sport involved is horse racing, which is accustomed to dreadful moments when much-loved family members have to be executed. Normally, though, it is only the horses who are quietly shot. And it happens behind the screens. This time it’s on the screen: the victims are the human cast of Channel 4’s racing coverage.
After the big post-Christmas meetings at Kempton and Chepstow, racing will vanish from Channel 4 and reappear on New Year’s Day – on ITV. There will be few survivors. This is not just a routine piece of sports-TV business: more like a final throw of the dice; the Last Chance Saloon; the Get-out-of-Trouble Stakes in which every penny goes on a last desperate punt.
Like cricket and golf, racing is facing a decline in interest. Unlike them, it has not been seduced by the Kaa-the-snake blandishments of Sky (“Trust in me, just in me …”). Every piddly Monday afternoon selling plate can be observed somewhere amid the vast emptiness of the television galaxy. But when racing is shown on a major general-interest channel, betting turnover shoots up. And, as everyone knows, betting sustains racing.
The numbers are not what they were, however, which is why the sport has opted for its second upheaval in four years. It is impossible not to detect a hint of panic.
It may seem strange now but in the old days racing was not just one part of British sporting telly, it was the linchpin of the whole thing. Live football was largely off limits, other sports were seasonal but for years both the BBC and ITV would be showing up to 11 races between them every Saturday barring frost, fog or foot-and-mouth.
When the BBC had a monopoly, it did its utmost to pretend that betting did not exist. The revered commentator Peter O’Sullevan would stop talking when the course announcer gave out the prices over the loudspeaker, otherwise the viewers would never find out. When ITV joined in, it went to the other extreme, partly because it liked to be a bit cheeky and anti-establishment and partly because the team member in charge of the betting was also the boss.
It was not all that cheeky: ITV’s frontman was John Rickman of the Daily Mail, a charming old gent who would doff his trilby to say good afternoon to viewers.
In those days ITV was not a monolith but devolved to the regions in a most un-British fashion. The regional satraps began to notice that, if racing was cancelled and an old film went on, up went the viewing figures. So their own interest dwindled. Fortunately, Channel 4 started in 1982, desperate for sporting product, and not averse to minorities. It really was capable of being cheeky and developed its own gang-of-slightly-spiky-chums style.
Grizzled John Oaksey and boyish Brough Scott were the frontmen, with sardonic John Francome as the lead expert and John McCririck revolutionising the presentation of betting until, as Jeffrey Bernard put it, he began to make a cult of himself. It was, says Scott, “a mix of afternoon drive time and Test Match Special”.
The BBC maundered on until 2013, doing less and less but doing it ever more irritatingly, investing its remaining big days with up-itself portentousness: all forced banter, moody music and silly slo-mo. Cut to the steeplechase, I kept thinking.
Finally, Channel 4 got the monopoly but also dumped its longstanding production company, Highflyer, and gave the contract to IMG. The format did need refreshing but IMG’s main innovations were less humour and more earnest analysis plus a coffee-table video screen. Ratings fell further.
Now the sport has gone wholesale to ITV. But there is no magic bullet. Racing’s audience was once a unique and successful alliance between the rural gentry and the urban working class, both declining. And Britain can now bet on anything, especially football, on which millions have strong opinions. So much easier than the complexities of racing, where the trainer knows more than the punter and the horse knows more than the trainer.
Maybe it will work: cross-promotion is one bonus. But it is hard to be hopeful. ITV has rarely been great a sports broadcaster. Most of its 90-plus days a year will be on something called ITV4, which is free-to-air but no one’s first port of call unless they are really obsessed with Ironside and Minder. They have dumped Simon Holt, O’Sullevan’s acknowledged heir as the master commentator. The reasoning for this is opaque.
And all their changes, justifiable or not, may be almost irrelevant. Most of all, the viewers want to watch the races. Scott is being restored to the mix, as an occasional still-not-very-grey eminence. But, as he says: “It’s like a pub changing hands. People will want to try it but they won’t keep coming just because the bar staff are friendly. The food and drink has got to be good.”
