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If only there was a gold medal for moaning about moaning.
I didn’t think there was anything to stop people putting up positive threads. Perhaps someone can count up how many Drone has initiated recently. Nothing on the last four pages.
Racing is already a minority. If racing ends up on More 4 it might not be a disaster but it takes it a little further down the slippery slope towards terrestrial obscurity. Yes, thankfully we have two dedicated channels. Unfortunately, one of those is pitched very much at the insider and is very expensive for a stand alone channel. Fine, if you can afford £20,000 a year to throw at a hobby, but for the average man in the street it is a different story? Racing just appears intent on making its little bubble even smaller.
Which stand alone channel costs twenty grand a year. You have been had there
Even I am not that gullible. That’s just a guess figure for owning a racehorse.
There do seem to be a large number of people who only watch BBC1.
I have to confess 99% of my live TV viewing is BBC channels – simply because I cannot abide programs being interrupted by advertising.
The rare occasion there is anything worth watching on a commercial channel I invariably record it so I can skip the adverts.
I think the only programs I have watched live on commercial TV this year were the Rugby World Cup games and there, at least, the adverts didn’t interfere with the actual play.
I have never understood why, if you are a motor racing fan or a horse racing enthusiast and your sport of choice changes channel, it is so difficult to hover your trembling and quivering finger over the 4 button on the remote rather than the 1 or 2 button and press downwards.
Surely if you love the sport, it should be immaterial which channel it is on. My brother loves motor racing and, although he is used to watching it on the BBC or Sky, he won’t have any problem making the switch to Channel 4, even with adverts.
I’ve never understood why the droves of Royal Ascot fans who loved watching it on the BBC, including no doubt many casual, once a year viewers, suddenly couldn’t make the not-so-difficult migration to Channel 4. Surely if you like watching the spectacle of an event, you wouldn’t give up and boycott it just because it has moved to Channel 4.
But that’s what seemed to happen with the Channel 4 viewing figures for Royal Ascot. The Grand National figures have fared better.
Seeing former BBC commentator Murray Walker on the news bemoaning the loss of BBC motor racing coverage reminded me of the time when he confessed that he was often not even at the race circuit to cover many of the races and did the commentaries with James Hunt from the local TV pictures coverage at the BBC studios in this country.
He admitted that when he said “I cannot see from my commentary position ….” he wasn’t actually lying but was just giving the impression to the viewer that he was actually at the circuit looking out from a commentary box. An illusion shattered!
Bernie’s made a big mistake here if he thinks C4 will get the same viewing figures as the Beeb, or even ITV. Sit back and watch F1’s viewing figures follow racing’s next year. Down and down and down and …
Frankly, if the Beeb want to make real savings in the sports department they can drop any and all football coverage. Probably costs them more than the £35mil of F1 and plenty of other channels cover the sport anyway so Beeb’s is no loss.
In this digital age does it really matter if the racing is on C4 or More 4?
90 odd percent of viewers can get both channels and if people want to watch the racing they still can – in truth I’m not sure how many casual or passing viewers C4 racing actually gets although I suspect it isn’t many and probably less than there would be on the, so called, two “main” channels.
The racecourses sign exclusive contracts to ATR & RUK therefore they cannot sign to More4 as this is not terrestrial so Channel 4 technically are supposed to show racing on Channel 4.
To all those people asking why people only watch 1-5 this is something that has been debated over the years on forums and these are the main reasons:
1) People say they pay for the licence fee and will only watch BBC-1 as they have paid for it and expect to watch the best shows on the main channel.
2) People will not explore passed the first five channels as they think it’s all rubbish and can’t be bothered with the hassle.
3) The way the ratings are gathered by pencil and paper from a small survey no one really knows what the viewing actually are and the people asked to fill in the surveys tend to be loyal to the main channels.
4) People start at number 1 on channel guide and tend to not venture much further.
5) People have BBC-1 on as wallpaper – ie dentist/doctors surgeries.
6) People forget to check other channels they don’t normally watch.
Just like some members on here
only read the horse racing section of the forum and will not venture south….. 😉Blackbeard to conquer the World
It’s pointless moaning about how people ought to be more willing to switch to channels other than the traditional terrestrial ones, particluarly BBC1 and BBC2. The fact remains that many don’t, and believe it or not, ratings are important to advertisers and tv executives.
As for clashes with F1 practice sessions and the grands prix themselves, then it’s likely that the first hour of some current racing OBs will have to be switched to More4, or omitted entirely. This isn’t the end of the world, and racing should feel very lucky to be the only sport on free-to-air that gets broadcast 52 weeks of the year. There’s no fundamental reason that it uniquely deserves this privilege.
In any case, it may well be that ITV and/or BBC pick some broadcasting rights for racing in the near future.
If the BBC does get racing back, I hope they make a better job of it than they did of SPOTY, which looked to me as though it had been produced by an excited group of media studies kids.
No more interviews or box-ticking to gather viewing figures, it’s done digitally by monitoring 5,100 set-top boxes:
More than 5,000 homes are enrolled in Barb’s nationwide panel of viewers, sending information from set-top TV boxes each day to create a comprehensive picture of what people are watching across the British Isles.
Participants earn rewards that can range from cinema tickets and restaurant vouchers to brand-name perfumes and bottles of champagne, and even expensive luxuries such as Blu-ray home entertainment systems. The scheme isn’t open to everyone, however.Anyone can apply to join the panel, but selection is rigorous. Homes are chosen according to social class, income, family size and location, so that the whole panel reflects the demographic make-up of the whole country.
Barb and its pollster, Kantar Media, even ensure they pick some households where little telly is watched, to represent that minority who rarely switch on their sets.
The racecourses sign exclusive contracts to ATR & RUK therefore they cannot sign to More4 as this is not terrestrial so Channel 4 technically are supposed to show racing on Channel 4.
More4 IS a terrestrial channel – Freeview Channel 14
It will be remembered that Channel 4 Racing has already had to accommodate a rival sport on broadcast dates in the recent past, races having been fit in between Test Match cricket from 1999 to 2005 inclusive.
That didn’t seem to work too badly on the whole, but whether a Formula One/racing hybrid show would function as well is another matter. There are bigger power brokers – Mr Ecclestone and Dubai respectively – behind the scenes of both sports this time around, and I doubt either is going to be as receptive to having their coverage interrupted or curtailed by the other as, say, the ECB appeared to be over a decade ago.
Then again, one potential positive compared to the racing-cricket coexistence is that in contrast to Test matches, a Grand Prix weekend’s coverage is only particularly invasive on a Sunday. Assuming there isn’t a big build-up to what isn’t even the race proper, an accident-free Saturday qualification ought to be done and dusted well inside of an hour, causing disruption to less than half of a normal length edition of Channel 4 Racing.
Notable also is the apparent lack (unless anyone can see something that I can’t) of any deep and meaningful established interest that anyone especially strongly associated with Formula One broadcasting or presenting at the moment has in the turf. At least I’m not aware that, say, Allan McNish or David Coulthard have annual memberships at Kelso that they’ve kept jolly quiet.
Yes, one can point to Formula One frontwoman Suzi Perry co-hosting Royal Ascot during the dying throes of its coverage on the BBC (and even to her participation in Sport Relief’s celebrity showjumping event Only Fools on Horses were you so minded); but that could only count as a superficial interest at best, set next to arch racing fans Richie Benaud and Michael Atherton’s regular appearances (and tips) on The Morning Line and cheery tolerance of the racing cutting into a Test broadcast six or seven times in an afternoon.
gc
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Eddie Jordan is a bit of a racing fan and has been an owner in the past, and Bernie Ecclestone has had a few horses, He’s No Angel being one.
I can’t see that it matters much, the OBs aren’t going to be interleaved.
When the F1 broadcast is finished, then either a shortened C4 racing will follow on, say at 2.15 or 2.30, or they’ll switch back from More4 if they choose to show the first two or three races live.
Not sure the core following are too bothered about the minority tag. No doubt many like to cling to the elitist feel of the sport.
How hard has Channel 4 been working to attract a wider audience?
As far as I could see the last overhaul just moved it closer to a terrestrial RUK. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that viewing figures have not exactly been boosted by the changes.
If Channel 4 were serious about broadening its horizons it needs to make drastic changes.
The programme needs to offer something different so first and foremost it should be about entertainment. If you particularly want masses of analysis stick with the racing channels or read the latest thesis from James Willoughby.
Personally, I would start by ditching Luck and Balding. I know Luck has been broadcaster of the year 153 times but that is voted for by a band of people who probably think RUK is the bees knees. In fact they probably have a stake in it. Just send Luck back to where he belongs and no doubt Balding will not be short of another vehicle to highlight her jack of all trades quality. It really would be lovely to think we could finally move away from a pool of presenters seemingly picked from public school, mummy and daddy are ‘racing insiders’ or ex-jocks. Never quite understood why you might need a degree to prattle on about horse racing either.
You are never going address the flat cap and tweed issues but Channel 4 got Gok on board so why on earth don’t they use him to sort out the presenters? None of them can do smart casual. Who wants to see a bunch of suits because that is all they can manage?
Betting should be a vital area but it is currently headed up by someone who struggles to string a sentence together. That can’t be right.
Racing is an outdoor sport so why do we need a little box for the likes of Cunningham and McGrath to pontificate? Hardly laugh a minute stuff from two boys who are prone to take themselves just a little too seriously.
The names to bring in are Matt Chapman and Tom Stanley.
I couldn’t disagree more with Chapman regarding the whip issue but that aside he is by far and away the best racing presenter on any of the channels. The best two shows on either racing channel are Chapman’s Monday night’s at Windsor and more recently the On The Line show. Unlike just about anyone else Chapman can make those within racing appear almost human.
Tom Stanley looks as if he spends half a day in front of a mirror but he has developed a likeable style.
Just getting those two on board would be a major improvement.
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