There was more to John McCririck than met the eye. And that’s saying something.
John - I never addressed him as ‘Big Mac’ - was happy to portray himself as the arm-waving Old Harrovian who’d had rather too much fun with the dressing-up box.
With his sideburns, trademark deerstalker - which now and then gave way to his understated purple fedora - and cape, McCririck had no intention of blending into the background.
He was the unashamed sexist and and staunch defender apologist of the English class system, who delighted in causing offence to more politically correct souls - which basically took in the rest of the population.
But anyone who saw McCririck as just a loudmouth, wheeled on the television to start a fight, was missing the point.
Before he became the flamboyant TV caricature who blew like a hurricane through the sets of Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Wife Swap and Celebrity Coach Trip, McCririck was a superb newspaper journalist whose knowledge of the betting landscape was genuinely second to none.
He won myriad writing awards, and his greatest scoop of all was exposing the Tote scandal in 1979, whereby returns were being rigged to shortchange the punter.
Despite his lofty schooling McCririck - once finding his platform on Channel 4 Racing, which ended in controversy in 2012 - was determined to fight a battle for those fiver-and-tenner merchants at the bottom of the betting food chain.
They, in their thousands, he would remind viewers, are the ones who keep the game afloat.
We had different views on virtually everything. Principally politics, and only a fortnight ago I contacted him to say how Boris Johnson is going to be a disastrous Prime Minister for Britain.
His response - “Up Boris!” - was typical of a man who never knowingly espoused a middle-of-the-road opinion.
He was a man who made the world a more fun, enlivening place to be.
And it’s that much greyer for his passing.
