Losing my career is killing me. And I just can’t forgive what Clare Balding said about me
That’s the despairing lament of racing legend John McCririck, who’s a shadow of his former self after C4 fired him. His only consolation? His beloved ‘Booby’...
JOHN McCRIRICK doesn’t believe he will live to see another summer. He feels it in his bones and doesn’t much care. ‘What purpose is there in going on if you’re not working?’ he says.
‘Racing was my life but now when I go I think: “What am I doing here?” I feel like a dinosaur. You’re a lost soul wandering around an environment you’re no longer part of.
‘Life is empty. I don’t expect to be alive this time next year. It’s a question of slipping away. I’ve prepared the Booby [his saintly wife, Jenny] for it. When I’m gone she knows exactly what to do and she’ll be fine.’
McCririck, 78, was the face of C4 horseracing for as long as anyone can remember. That was until he was dropped in 2012 after 28 years because he was (to use words from an employment tribunal where he sued for ageism) ‘offensive’ and ‘disgusting’. He has never recovered.
Earlier this month, viewers were truly shocked to see him in a rare television appearance on Big Brother’s Bit On The Side looking close to death’s door. He has been suffering formuch of the year with a chest infection, but doctors cannot find the cause.
‘I’m pining,’ he says. ‘The broken heart is for a lost job. Work comes first. Put that in capital letters. I always worked. It’s the most important thing in life.
‘I was devastated when we lost the tribunal, but it was what was said behind the scenes — what we read in the emails used as evidence — that was so hurtful. When I saw Channel 4’s documents at the tribunal then I knew — I knew what people thought of me.’
This is the first time McCririck has spoken about all this. An Old Harrovian educated in an age that’s a world apart from these touchyfeely, confessional times, he is not usually one to show raw emotion. ‘The worst thing that can happen is when your own turn on you,’ he says with a heart-weary sigh. He remains deeply wounded by what he sees as a gross betrayal at that time by fellow broadcaster, Clare Balding.
‘I’ve not told this to anybody, but I do deeply regret what Clare Balding did,’ he says. ‘We saw, in the documents, what she was saying. I’d been a huge admirer of hers. I’d believed she was one of mine. She’s a tremendous broadcaster not just in Britain but worldwide.
‘We first met when she was President of the Cambridge Union and I was a speaker. Four years before she was approached by Channel 4, she asked if I’d be interested in being the BBC’s betting correspondent and acted as the intermediary.
‘This is how our relationship was and why her betrayal was so hurtful to me. I thought I got on well with her. She said some very unpleasant things.’
Unpleasant? What was said about him was downright heartless.
Take this extract from an email Balding, who had been newly appointed as the ‘jewel in the crown’ presenter for Channel 4 racing, sent to the channel’s boss Jay Hunt after a private conversation with her old pal McCririck.
‘ . . . although he is ranting on about ageism like a loon, I think he probably deserves a call from the top. You would have to put up with listening to a lot of crap and bear in mind that anything you say will be repeated by him (and probably to the Press)...’
CLARE BALDING was asked to talk about McCririck’s feelings of betrayal but made no comment. The racing world, which has been part of McCririck’s life since betting shops first opened in 1961, is a tightly knit circle he thought of ‘like a family’.
‘On Channel 4 racing we went round together, we had dinner together,’ he says.
‘I don’t trust anyone now. In fairness to Clare she had to play a political game. She knew I was a lost cause because there was a new production company [which had secured the contract for Channel 4 racing] who wouldn’t have me.
‘What happened would still have happened without her — those flames would have still burnt — but she was a key member of the team that took over and she supported the flames.
‘But remember the suits and the skirts stick together so once one lot gets rid of you, the others think, “there must be something wrong with him. He must be a sexist pig or whatever they’re claiming you are”.
‘I became unemployable. I shall never recover.’
He sneezes loudly. McCririck has lost seven stone, is unsteady on his feet and horribly depressed.
‘I’m not going to have a funeral,’ he continues. ‘The Booby is going to scatter my ashes at the furlong pole at Alexandra Park [the racecourse in North London that closed in September 1970]. Nobody else will be there because I’m not having any announcements.
‘I have no fear of death. There is no God. No heaven. When you die you don’t go anywhere. You’re like that leaf,’ he points to a leaf on the floor. ‘It falls from a tree, reaches the ground and it’s dead.’
‘That leaf’ was growing on a lilac tree planted in McCririck’s small courtyard patio at his North London mews house. It is where one of racing’s most colourful characters spent most of this summer, when he has been well enough to leave his bedroom. To see him here in such low spirits is enormously sad.
‘I’ve had a chest infection and I seem to have a cold all the time but they [the doctors] can’t find anything. I wish they could. I’ve been examined, had blood tests — all that kind of thing,’ he says.
‘I’m sure it all started when I was sacked because you get more and more . . .’
He stops to watch another leaf fall to the ground. ‘I hope I’m not selfpitying because I don’t self-pity, but when you wake up in the morning you just feel miserable. There’s no routine. I have Jeremy Kyle, This Morning and that’s about it.’
Exhausted, he lays back on the rattan day bed that his wife, whom McCririck calls Booby (‘after a South American bird that is stupid, incredibly easy to catch and squawks a lot’), installed to tempt him outside. She bought an electric patio heater too, but it isn’t working.
Instead, she wraps him in pink and blue blankets with animal paw prints — the fluffy sort you’d give to a young child.
Looking after him is, she says, ‘hell’, but you know she’d move heaven and earth to see him well again.
‘He’s a bloody nuisance but what can you do? You can’t say, “I’m going away”, can you? You just get on with it,’ she says.
‘Anyway, I don’t think I’d be very good on my own.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ McCririck insists. ‘You’ve got an intuitive genius for fixing things. I don’t know how I’d have coped without you. You’re the carer of the century. I’m not the easiest of patients.’
He turns to me. ‘Mind you, the only reason I was attracted to her is she had a Labrador called Simon. I’d always wanted a dog and never had one.’
THE attempt at humour seems to sap the little strength he has. He leans back on the cushions. ‘I have my enemies out there in the world but when I come back here there’s the two Labradors and Gertrude the cat. They think I’m wonderful. The Booby’s the same.
‘Whatever a rock is, she is a Booby. Without the Booby I’d be nothing. How many marriages in the equestrian world survive? Very few. I always say once you sit on a horse it stirs something up…’
‘Stop it John,’ Jenny, a no-nonsense Yorkshire woman to whom he has been married for 47 years, tries to shut him up.
‘They think I’m a sexist pig but there are relatively few people who are still married to the same person. In the training areas, at Lambourn, Newmarket, among the stable staff, the trainers — even Polish lap dancers now — they’re all having affairs.’ What about him? ‘I’ve never wanted to because I’ve got the Booby. I wouldn’t want to hurt her,’ he says with absolute sincerity before adding: ‘Women have been after me all the time as you can imagine, but I’ve held them off.’
Jenny rolls her eyes but, in truth, she’s thrilled to see his spirits rally. ‘If only he had a job to do,’ she says later. ‘You can see how much this interview has lifted him.’
The banter and sexist jokes Channel 4 held against him are, she insists, pure pantomime. McCririck is the ‘kindest, most generous’ husband she could have wished for. The
thought of losing him terrifies her. She is furious with those who, she feels, have let him down.
‘It churns you up when you know people are not straight in life,’ she says. ‘It’s like you trust them then they turn round and stab you in the back. I thought Clare was a friend. I think she even left a message on the phone when he was dropped.’
McCririck’s decline began when he lost his case for age discrimination five years ago. In the tribunal, Channel 4 executives successfully argued that he had been dropped because his ‘loud, brash, aggressive and long-winded’ presenting style put off audiences, who found his behaviour ‘obnoxious’.
They claimed he had lost his journalistic credibility after throwing tantrums during appearances on reality TV shows including Celebrity Big Brother and Celebrity Wife Swap. In its judgment, the tribunal panel said: ‘All the evidence is that Mr McCririck’s pantomime persona, as demonstrated on the celebrity television appearances, and his persona when appearing on Channel 4 Racing, together with his self-described bigoted and male chauvinist views were clearly unpalatable to a wider potential audience.’
McCririck had thought he was on firm ground given Channel 4’s new boss, Jay Hunt, had been successfully sued in a high-profile case brought by Countryfile’s Miriam O’Reilly during her tenure at the BBC.
‘I grew up in a time when women were called birds and it wasn’t intended to be offensive, nor was it offensive to open doors for them. Jeremy Kyle still calls them birds but he’s an exception,’ he says. ‘The younger generation always seem to be “offended” or “upset” by anything they deem to be politically incorrect.’
MCCRIRICK has worked as a waiter, a commis chef, in betting shops, as a racecourse Tic-Tac and floorman and journalist on Sporting Life, where he won two British Press Awards. He spent ten years on BBC Grandstand with the likes of Frank Bough, David Coleman and Des Lynam before going to Channel 4.
‘I have been very depressed,’ he says. ‘When you’re not working and you go to the races, you feel increasingly remote.’
Again, he falls back on the cushions. McCririck really is frighteningly weak. Jenny bristles: ‘He used to be doing things all the time. People were always phoning up saying: “Will you come on this programme. Will you talk about this or that”, but the Channel 4 people put him down so much and said those awful lies. He isn’t a sexist pig. Why did they say that?’ She turns to her husband.
‘Is it because you think women belong in the kitchen, that sort of thing?’
‘I’ve never been in a kitchen in my life,’ says McCririck. ‘I suppose the nicknames might have been part of it. I called my TV betting ring colleague Tanya Stevenson The Female. That came about because somebody came into the press room and said: “Is the female from Channel 4 in here?”
‘But I’ve never used a nickname if anyone didn’t approve of it. It was just banter. Fun. Clare was, “the ravishing Clare Balding and I’d like to give her a ravish”. When you go into her sexual preferences [Clare is married to former Radio 4 presenter Alice Arnold] you can see I was being ridiculous.’
Last year, for the first time in goodness how long, McCririck wasn’t invited to Kempton Races on Boxing Day — a highlight of the racing calendar. Within ten days he had fallen sick.
For three weeks, he was bedridden and in pain. He was on antibiotics for nine weeks as doctors carried out tests. Jenny was beside herself as he wasted away.
‘He couldn’t speak for three months,’ she says. ‘There was a chest infection, all sorts of things. Doctors didn’t understand. He didn’t want to eat and was in such pain he couldn’t stand up.
‘He couldn’t watch the racing, couldn’t read the papers. He was so ill I thought, “My God, what’s going to happen now?”
She adds: ‘People want him to write another book but he won’t do that either, will you?’
McCririck shakes his head wearily: ‘I can’t do it any more Booby. I just can’t.’