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Watched 30 minutes and got bored, I’m no prude but the swearing seems a bit naughty schoolboy. I agree the constant reference to the value of the Betfair hurdle was tedious.
The things I want most in life are the things that I can't win.
I’ve just caught up with a couple more episodes. I think it’s great and the editing is superb. I’m probably enjoying it more than watching last seasons racing which I really struggled with because of so many fatalities and it’s reminded me of why I love NH racing. I’ve seen several racing people in a totally new light and am in even more awe of jockeys for the way they shrug off such awful injuries. It’s also made me forgive Willie Mullins for winning everything and made me like him again.
I’ve made it through the first four episodes now and I’ve worked out why I’m so completely ungripped by a programme that should be a compelling showcase for a sport I love.
The good bits are very good. There’s been some excellent footage of racing, some useful backstage content, and insightful interviews with individuals like Cobden, Nicholls, Skelton and Mullins.
What absolutely wrecks it for me is the incessant babbling interruptions from a ceaseless stream of talking heads. There’s Ed and Oli and Alice and Chris and Aly and so, so many more butting in to tell us, again and again, stuff we already knew.
The clear impression is that the programme makers do not trust the sport enough to believe it will be sufficiently visually engaging on its own, with a single off-screen narrator giving us an occasional verbal steer.
I’d much rather have the screen filled with horses and the people who work with them, than yet another presenter telling me, yet again, that the Cheltenham Gold Cup is a really big race.
Before anyone suggests that, as a racing fan, I’m not the audience for this… I watched the last episode with a non-expert and she was massively unimpressed. It just feels like an opportunity missed.
I think that’s pretty much how documentaries work, format wise, though. Pretty sure that the excellent one about Dream Alliance indispersed the footage with snippets of interviews with people. I watch a lot of documentaries because I’ve seen plenty of bad films but can’t remember ever seeing a bad documentary and think the pace of Champions is excellent. Even more so the editing when you think of how much would have been filmed with the majority of it not fitting the narrative. When it showed Gallopin des Champs falling at Cheltenham I actually screamed even though I obviously knew it had happened.
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