‘I will not sit here and just slag off the BBC’
Veteran broadcaster Cornelius Lysaght is sad at being given the push, he tells Tom Morgan
Radio 5 Live is losing its authoritative voice of racing, but not its most loyal fan. “I’m not going to sit here and slag off the BBC,” says Cornelius Lysaght, the 54-year-old victim of a strategic cull aimed, it would appear, at attracting younger listeners. “The decision to let me go is obviously disappointing. It’s sad, and I think the BBC is wrong. However, I respect its right to do so because I’ve had a really happy relationship with the BBC for 30 years. And I’m absolutely in love with radio.”
Racing is getting less air time than ever on the station, and the designated correspondent is being made redundant – after Cheltenham and the Grand National – in the spring along with fellow staffer and host Jonathan Overend. Mark Pougatch – another respected anchor – has also been told there is no regular work, but Lysaght claims he is refusing to believe they can all be victims of the “under-35s” policy pursued with fervour by the BBC’S director of radio, James Purnell. “I’m sure the BBC wouldn’t want to break the law,” he adds.
Whatever happens next, Lysaght says his beloved BBC must not forget the “intimacy” of the relationship between radio and listener. “I remember Sir Mark Prescott, a doyen of racing, telling me, ‘If you come on and I’m not in the bath, I know I’m late’. I told him, ‘Unfortunately, Mark, now I have a vision of you in the bath every morning’.”
He says broadcasters should remember radio “is about the listener being a part of the conversation”.
“There is an intimacy about radio broadcasting that I sometimes think people need to remember,” he says. “Listeners are on headphones, you are in their ears, you’re in their cars, you’re in their bedrooms, you’re under their pillows, you’re with Prescott in his bathroom. That intimacy doesn’t exist in other media.”
Sent to boarding school at the age of eight, Lysaght would find comfort listening to BBC dispatches on the black Roberts radio his father had given him as a six-year-old. Among those voices was Peter Bromley, a man he would succeed as racing correspondent. “When people had ghetto blasters or great big modern radios, I just had a little radio that looked like it could have come out of my mother’s bathroom,” he remembers of his years at Eton. “I do remember Cheltenham, which was Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, then. I would normally be doing games, but during that week I remember I would walk down to the high street, buy a ginger beer, a packet of crisps and go back to my room and just listen to what was then Radio 2 presented by Gloria Hunniford or someone like that in the Seventies. Sport on Two was the programme which is now Radio 5 Live.”
His Irish father, Dermot, a bookshop owner in Ross-on-wye, gave him the bug for racing. In his holidays, he would record his own race meetings on his tape recorder and by the age of 17 he had talked his way into a job at his local commercial station, Severn Sound. “My first week of broadcasting was the week Charles and Diana got married in 1981,” he says. “I was still at Eton. It was in the year before I took my A-levels and I should have been revising, which is probably why my A-levels were so poor.”
In 1990, he joined the BBC as one of the first voices on what was then Radio 5, eventually replacing Bromley, the BBC’S racing correspondent since 1959, in 2001. “Bromley was really a commentator. He was a big character with a wonderful voice.”
Lysaght also had the rich, baritone voice, but colleagues say he added a pedigree for breaking scoops to the role, including the plane crash in 2000 that nearly killed Frankie Dettori, and a notably cool head under pressure.
In 2003, he was part of the Radio 5 Live racing team who won a Sony Award for coverage of the Cheltenham Festival. However, he cites the 1997 Grand National – delayed by an IRA bomb threat – as his most enduring memory. “It was the one that had everything,” he says. “No tragedy, but from a reporting view, it was the most exhilarating weekend I have ever worked. There was the Dunkirk spirit, everyone piling into trains. A lot of people standing there in what they had been wearing and that was the great image. I remember walking with jockeynow-trainer Jamie Osborne and, as we wandered through the station in Liverpool, he was wearing his blue silks. Someone shouted, ‘Hey mate, have you come straight from work?’ ”
Of his future, he has taken on more social media training to future-proof himself. “The man that runs Chepstow came up to me on Welsh Grand National day and said, ‘I think I know what you should do – you ought to run a racecourse because you’ve been telling me how to run mine for years’.”
He adds that, while “I would never say never about anything, there is a possibility I shall never chase a deadline, and I’ll never be part of the throng around a racecourse trainer, trying to get that interview, which has been part of the thrill for decades”.
He is particularly proud of his involvement in Saturday coverage. “Sports Report on 5 Live is one of the great institutions and I’ve been part of those Saturdays for a very long time. I have to accept that won’t happen anymore. I’ve got to live and eat somehow, so I’ll need to work out a way to keep doing it.”
‘I’ve got to live and eat, so I’ll need to work out a way to keep doing it’