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Seeing blanket coverage of some darts games this afternoon on BBC1 rather than horse racing coverage from Ascot does anyone know what the viewing figures would be for the respective sports/games on a Saturday afternoon?
Eddie , good question , it got me thinking though , there are probably just as many folks who watch darts as racing
We forget sometimes that we are a minority sport , and overall the BBC have got it right
cheers
Ricky
It matters not a jot which one has the higher viewing figures, it’s cheaper to send Colin Murray & a couple of cameras to Hull than it is to pay SIS for the feed from Ascot. Even more so if they send their own cameras.
I don’t see how we can possibly complain to be honest.
For those who don’t have Sky, racing is on every Saturday. Darts fans without Sky get their sport twice a year on free tv & this World Masters is only a recent addition.That said, there has been darts, motor racing & cricket on ITV4 this year. Things are getting better for sport on free tv, just not from the Beeb.
Becher Chase live on BBC on November 21st by the way. Anyone know if that was always in their plans? The way the website advertises it makes it look like it’s a late addition.
Becher Chase live on BBC on November 21st by the way. Anyone know if that was always in their plans? The way the website advertises it makes it look like it’s a late addition.
It’s a late addition – the BBC had planned to dump it but Aintree lobbied very hard.
Next year they’re moving the meeting to get the race covered by Ch4
Which makes me wonder just how much the other courses lobbied the BBC, I bet they didn’t. Not for a second.
Alot of racing’s problems are being blamed on the bookies not putting enough in, the BBC not dedicating enough time to it & the general incompetence of the BHA. All of which are fair shouts but I personally think the racecourses themselves aren’t doing nearly enough.
anthonycutt
30 Oct 2010, 15:05
It matters not a jot which one has the higher viewing figures, it’s cheaper to send Colin Murray & a couple of cameras to Hull than it is to pay SIS for the feed from Ascot. Even more so if they send their own cameras.I don’t see how we can possibly complain to be honest.
For those who don’t have Sky, racing is on every Saturday. Darts fans without Sky get their sport twice a year on free tv & this World Masters is only a recent addition.That said, there has been darts, motor racing & cricket on ITV4 this year. Things are getting better for sport on free tv, just not from the Beeb.
Becher Chase live on BBC on November 21st by the way. Anyone know if that was always in their plans? The way the website advertises it makes it look like it’s a late addition.
just to be pedantic, but where can I get this "free tv" please? I have to pay a licence fee to watch bbc et all (is it around £120 pa now?) I’ve always found it funny that people seem to think TV is free
One of my students has a PT job in a bookies. He says that it’s only old people that bet on horses in there, all the young ones go on football etc. He reckons that racing is in big trouble & needs to work hard to attract a younger audience or it will be dead in a generation. Frightening thought.
- Total Posts 17716
He reckons that racing is in big trouble & needs to work hard to attract a younger audience or it will be dead in a generation. Frightening thought.
He reckons wrong. Young people have a curious tendency to turn into old people, and old people (taking "old" as anything over 40) are the ones who’ve always made up the bulk of racing’s audience. It’s a sport which people tend to get attracted to later on, just as whisky replaces martini as the taste buds mature and become more sophisticated.
Young people will not have so much spare money in the generation to come, and we have an ageing population. That’s why it is lacking in foresight or wisdom for the BHA to try, like some hip modern Christ figure, to turn racing’s whisky into martini.
Racing should be spending its PR budget appealing not to the young, but to the middle aged and elderly. It should also, as you rightly hint, be weaning itself off the decaying link with the High Street bookmakers. The focus is now on track, and on line.
These are not new arguments for this forum, but I sometimes think we’re in danger of hearing the received wisdoms so often that we’re brainwashed into going along with them, in spite of the fiscal facts.
I find i dont get into betting offices much now since betting online but well remember a time particularly on big meeting days or weekends when you could not get in the shops because they were packed particularly when they were next to a pub but i find now it is younger people in there now but its betting on football or these horrible gambling machines, clearly racing is facing a crisis and i wish i knew the answer.
We live in a sophisticated world nowadays, where the viewer would rather watch beer wallers down six pints while playing a pub game in front of Peggy Mitchell clones at the Circus Tavern, and football teams with the word ‘Glasgow’ in their name drubb third rate opposition week in and week out.
Maybe the beeb could save some money by dropping the Olympics in 2012? I understand that the world tiddlywinks championship is happening around the same time?- Total Posts 17716
clearly racing is facing a crisis and i wish i knew the answer.
The nature of the crisis is misunderstood, though. It has little to do with what goes on in betting offices, and much more to do with the disparity of the various self-interested parties attempting to take over the show.
Yes, it is a crisis when the BHA (which has limited power over events) has someone at the helm who blithely puts his mouth and his money in wildly different places; and when they spend so much of the money they
do
have on foolish, footling tinkering with marketing the Pattern.
Focus now needs to be on the
Tote
, which offers the only long term solution to the fiscal conundrum: but of course with the self-interested parties busy pushing their own agendas, the Tote is the
last
thing they care about!
I love racing. I also enjoy watching the darts. I doubt I am alone. As Ricky Lake pointed out, racing is a minority sport as well, albeit not in the eyes of this forum.
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I love racing. I also enjoy watching the darts. I doubt I am alone. As Ricky Lake pointed out, racing is a minority sport as well, albeit not in the eyes of this forum.
At the risk of repeating myself, the concept of
"minority sport"
does not hold water, unless you accept that
every
sport is a minority interest. The majority of the British people is not that interested in sport, any more than it is interested in politics, the arts or anything much else outside work and family.
Looking at the minority of citizens who
are
significantly interested in sport, enough to spend money on it, go to it or bet on it, horse racing is the
second most popular
in the country, next to football – however the media choose to cut it. And it is a good second. Fact.
just to be pedantic, but where can I get this "free tv" please? I have to pay a licence fee to watch bbc et all (is it around £120 pa now?) I’ve always found it funny that people seem to think TV is free
My point should have been that racing fans pay their licence fee, darts fans pay theirs too. We get at least 60 days of coverage a year, darts gets 16. So let’s cut the BBC a bit of slack this time.
It’s only just occured to me, so there’s no reason why it should have occured to anyone else, but Channel 4 despite being a commercial station is also part funded by the licence fee.
I’ve always found it funny that when people are being pedantic, they often get simple things like the ‘quote’ option wrong along with basic punctuation & capital letters. Maybe that’s just me.
(PS Pinza is right. Racing is not a minority sport, if it were there wouldn’t be two tv channels exclusively dedicated to it.)
- Total Posts 17716
Racing is not a minority sport, if it were there wouldn’t be two tv channels exclusively dedicated to it.
Yes indeed. Unfortunately, if you’ve more than a passing interest in sport nowadays, you’re going to have to pay for your pleasure. You can watch every race in the UK and Ireland (plus loads else from America, France and elsewhere) live, online, for as little as £15.98 per month. Is that unreasonable?
Racing people are a lot better off on "free" terrestrial TV than cricket and football fans – how many test matches or Premiership games are shown
live
on BBC, ITV or Channel 4? And how many Racing Group 1’s (answer to latter =
all of them!
)
This seems to me something to be grateful for, and a recognition that racing is in no meaningful sense under-represented on terrestrial TV.
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