Outspoken journalist who became the face of TV racing
Any casual viewer flicking through the TV channels on a Saturday afternoon in the 1980s would surely have “stopped and done a double take” when they reached Channel 4, and their screen was filled by a large red-faced man, with Victorian-style mutton chop whiskers, gesticulating wildly in front of a crowd of racegoers. This would have been John McCririck, a journalist and broadcaster who for 29 years was racing’s bestknown, and most controversial, pundit, said The Times. With his bejewelled fingers and trademark deerstalker hat, he was flamboyant, and garrulous – and a shameless chauvinist. “The most important thing about [women] is the size of their breasts,” he’d say. He addressed his co-host Tanya Stevenson as “the female”, and referred to his wife Jenny as “the booby”, after a South American bird that is “stupid and squawks a lot”.
McCririck, who has died aged 79, grew up in Jersey, where his parents made a fortune from property. It was at Harrow that he developed a passion for racing. Known as the scruffiest boy on “the Hill”, he became the school bookie, was thrashed for being rude to the matron and gained only three O levels. His parents hoped he’d go on to join the diplomatic service, said The Daily Telegraph. Instead, he found work as a waiter at The Dorchester, then as a runner for an illegal street bookie. Later, he worked on a racecourse, where he picked up tic-tac, the bookies’ sign language (hence all the gesticulating) and their slang (“100 to 30, Burlington Bertie” etc). He moved onto the tipping index Formindex, and then became coursing correspondent at The Sporting Life (where he won two British Press Awards, including campaigning journalist of the year for exposing corrupt practices within the Tote). Around the same time he persuaded an old school friend, the BBC racing correspondent Julian Wilson, to employ him as a sub-editor on Grandstand. He moved into presenting in the 1980s, and started at Channel 4 in 1984, two years after its launch. “All horse racing is a jigsaw puzzle,” he once observed. “You’ve got the weight, the draw, the going and the form. TV can bring something that the papers can’t bring: how the horse looked in the paddock... how the market moves are going.”
An undoubted expert in his field, McCririck did much to draw audiences to racing, and was a great champion of the small punter; but in the 2000s, his persona “began to grate”. It also brought him to the attention of reality TV. On Celebrity Big Brother, he walked around in his underwear, and refused to speak for three days when he was denied his daily Diet Coke. Viewers were further appalled when he took part in Celebrity Wife Swap. And in 2007, he was thrown off The Alan Titchmarsh Show for being rude and confrontational. Channel 4 began to reduce his appearances and sacked him in 2012, when he was 72. He sued, claiming age discrimination, but the court ruled that he was the problem – “his style of dress, attitudes, opinions and tic-tac gestures” were not in keeping with the aims of a 21st century broadcaster. McCririck never professed to be nice. “I am nasty, and greedy,” he’d tell interviewers. “I’m not a pleasant person.” But Jenny, and others who knew him, insisted that all that was largely an act, and that off-screen, he was “generous, kind and extremely hard-working”.