ITV continue to deliver as they serve racing’s new audiences
As a new television deal is discussed, Alan Tyers believes the sport will not find a better partner
Racing’s television deal is up in the air, with the current contract on ITV coming to an end in nine months. Yesterday morning found racing bigwigs and ITV executives at Cheltenham trying to get a deal done.
We might not quite be at Europe v Britain over the Brexit withdrawal levels of tension just yet, but there is a sense that the clock has been run down more than it needed to be, and that in economically uncertain times, something that could have been simple has become rather complicated and fraught.
On day one of Cheltenham, one of the biggest days in the sport’s calendar, how did ITV do, how well is it serving the sport and should racing look elsewhere?
My personal view: the coverage is very good. Another personal view: the sport would be mad to consider anywhere else for its broadcast home.
All sports, indeed any human endeavours that want people to pay attention and money to them, face the problem that you might call the Jeremy Corbyn question. That puzzler is as follows: how do you reach out beyond the few hundred thousand absolute diehards who will back you no matter what and pull in the many millions more, who might be somewhat interested, but are not going to lose much sleep if you fell off the face of the earth.
Racing has an additional problem to solve, one thornier than picking the winner in even the toughest Cheltenham handicap: it does not have one audience. Students of the form, people who love the animals for their beauty and fragility, gambling addicts, people who like looking at the silks, professional gamblers, the working from home, the pretending to work from home, the sick, the self-isolating, people who have followed racing since the fifties, people who have never watched before, people who left the telly on ITV after This Morning, general sports fans, folk who stick the box on in the afternoon for a bit of company… all of these might be watching ITV on a typical Cheltenham Festival afternoon.
None of these groups are going to enjoy every minute of the 3½-hour afternoon broadcast, or the hour-long Opening Show on ITV4. Yesterday, for each viewer who wanted to see Francesca Cumani and Alice Plunkett running expert eyes over the physical qualities of each individual animal, there will have been one who loved the insights and back and forth between
Sir AP Mccoy and Ruby Walsh as they explained how Rachael Blackmore tactically had the better of Paul Townend in the Mares’ Hurdle as she came up the inside to win.
There will be some who enjoyed Gabriel Clarke’s profile with Blackmore and Jessica Harrington
about women in racing and others who do not see the point of all that fuss, one of whom, in fairness, could be said to be Blackmore herself.
There will be those who are gripped by Mick Fitzgerald and Luke Harvey getting right alongside the horses and the riders up at the start to describe the nerves and drama before they head off, and why false starts happen; there will be others who think that it’s just a big distraction from the real purpose of the show, like the tips and market insights from Matt Chapman and Brian Gleeson.
While they might not overlap much with readers of Telegraph
Sport, there will also be people who want to see Oli Bell doing the social media stuff with Love Island hunk Chris Hughes, yesterday shown on a video clip getting his fake tan done wearing only a thong. Not for me Clive, as another ITV sport legend would have put it, but presumably some people like it.
Furthermore, racing, even if it sometimes gives the impression it would like not to be, also sits in broader society: not everyone in Britain even thinks it should exist at all. Thus, there was a segment yesterday with a vet and Tom Scudamore explaining why horses love to race and compete.
So racing has not just one audience, but a plurality and ITV has tried gamely and largely successfully since New Year’s Day 2017 to give some of the people some of what they want some of the time. ITV have won a BAFTA for the coverage and viewing numbers are up from the Channel 4 days, which is not to be sneezed at in an era of atomised viewing and overall struggle for old media brands.
Part of the difficulty with the deal might be that, just as racing has more than one TV customer, it has more than one supplier of racing, like different powerbrokers, groups of racecourses and rights holders to negotiate with. That is of little concern to any of the myriad people watching at home and nor should it be.
But for them it is hard, in my view at least, to see what more ITV could do.