THE magic OF ASCOT

It’s Her Majesty’s favourite week, five days of thrilling racing at Royal Ascot. You can catch it all live on Channel 4 – and here’s everything you need to know

And they’re off! The Berkshire town of Ascot becomes a global party mecca to rival Monte Carlo this week as it hosts the Royal Ascot races. Revelries begin on Tuesday with the glorious Royal Procession of four open landau carriages transporting the Queen and her guests along the course to the Royal Box – a tradition that’s repeated daily.

That will signal the start of a jamboree enjoyed by more than a quarter of a million racegoers who’ll dress in their finery, splash out a fortune at the bookies, dine like, well, royals, and knock back 1.5 million units of alcohol, including champagne, wine, Pimm’s and beer.

Royal Ascot horse races have been a highlight of the society summer season for 300 years, and for the last half-century the extreme fashions and nerve-jangling racing have been compulsive television viewing, first on BBC and now on Channel 4.

This year the five days of racing, all shown live, will be more special than ever as Clare Balding, the treasured ‘voice of racing’, has announced that she’s scaling back on her commentating duties, and that Royal Ascot will be the only flat race meeting she’ll present on TV from now on.

Channel 4 will be giving Royal Ascot 30 hours of coverage and last year reached 6.2 million viewers over the week. The races are broadcast to 200 countries including Australia, Japan and the US – all of whom have horses racing.

With £5.5million in prize money up for grabs and more top-class races than anywhere in the world, it’s no wonder racing’s elite flock to the pretty Berkshire course. Some 60,000 racegoers arrive each day, with many paying £30 for a return ticket on the infamous ‘party train’, the Ascot Express from London Waterloo, which includes a glass of champagne.

On course the action begins at 2pm with the Royal Procession, the first race is off at 2.30pm and the last at 5.35pm. The most important races are run in the middle of the afternoon. On Tuesday there are two biggies: the King’s Stand Stakes at 3.40pm and the St James’s Palace Stakes at 4.20pm. For the rest of the week, 4.20pm is the time to be watching. On Wednesday the big race is the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, and on Thursday it’s the Gold Cup, recently won by the Queen’s horse Estimate. Friday’s big race is the Coronation Stakes, and on Saturday it’s the Diamond Jubilee Stakes.

At 6pm it’s time for communal singing around the bandstand near the Parade Ring. The Queen Mother always loved this tradition, and nowadays you can find yourself rubbing shoulders with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire while you sing Land Of Hope And Glory.

Of course, for many showing off is as important as the racing – though there are strict rules about how showy you can be. The 5,000 women who enter the Royal Enclosure each day, for instance, cannot have their hemlines any higher than just above the knee, and their shoulder straps must be at least 2.5cm (1in) wide. About £24 million will be spent on clothes, and bookies reckon that up to half the hats will be by the milliner Philip Treacy!

Coverage of the 30 races is very hi-tech compared with the BBC’s black-and-white pictures in the 1950s. TV graphics designer Rob Stewart, who helped pioneer cuttingedge camera technology to capture the action, explains how he hopes to transport armchair viewers to Ascot. ‘The course maps you see on TV use some fantastic helicopter footage to help give an impression of what it’s like to be there.’ A couple of bottles of champagne would help too!

Janet Menzies Royal Ascot starts Tuesday, 1.40pm, C4.