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With Ruk , each time Hislop and Mellish are on we get to see the horses , plus quality Punditry….outside of those 2 , its pretty mundane …not quite as good as it used to be , certainly not worth the 22 quid sub
Spot on there Ricky. The RUK coverage from Salisbury last Thursday a case in point.
Interesting comment/opinion piece to open with, the clerk interviewed regarding weather, watering and rail movement, paddock shots and comment for all the races I saw, a very interesting interview with Hugo Palmer, and as standard, the Mellish tip, Felwah, won the fillies handicap.
Mellish and Hislop combine knowledge, passion, professionalism and the ability to communicate on camera, into sports broadcasting at its finest.
RUK and the sport are lucky to have them.
Oli Bell has improved a lot lately and that’s good to see.
Overall though, RUK has a very worn, mundane, going through the motions, feel to much of its coverage at present. Certainly not worth the sub when you consider the cost of all the other sports channels these days.
Royal ascot is much the poorer for not being on atr. Hopefully it will return to the bbc sometime as their coverage was great . Ruk is not worth the money I’m afraid and Matt and the guys at atr are much more interesting and informative for me.
I think RUK should be a little more ruthless in cutting out the dead wood. I realise that it might seem heartless to axe Tom O’Ryan after his recent struggles, but I’d certainly approve of them diminishing his appearances.
His hideous features about great horses of the past lose much of their impact when coupled with his very limited repetoir of cliches and try-hard delivery.
I agree with the positive comments about Oli Bell, though. He seems much more confident in front of the camera and is settling into a lead role on the big days very well. More of the same there please.
Have been saying for years that Mellish & Hislop were a country mile ahead of any other presenters and would agree with the comments about Bell too nowadays.
I think I may be about to commit some sort of heresy here, but I must say I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the supposedly crucial (missing) coverage of horses ‘going round the paddock’.
I’m sure others are better judges, but I can’t see anything of use from a mounted TV shot of horses ambling around. It’s different if I’m at the track, but on telly they just all look exactly the same to me. If any of them play up, both channels do pick that out and show it anyway.
Were the (often pretty crap) comments to be blanked out, one would just be watching a number of horses wander round in circles. Nothing I can glean from that, but I realise I may be on my own here. And it gets worse: I’m also not that bothered about watching them go down to the start either!
I pay £22 a month to primarily watch the races. The rest is just window-dressing as far as I’m concerned, although obviously having decent presenters always helps.
Mike
Deposit £10.00 into Betdaq account and you can watch every race for free.
The only thing i want on RUK is the race coverage and I hate it when they focus on the winner close up so you can’t see what is happening amongst the place horses.
I’m not bothered about the pundits or paddock coverage.
Deposit £10.00 into Betdaq account and you can watch every race for free.
Oh I know, there’s loads of sites where one can watch, but I like it on my telly rather than computer / smartphone. I often just have it on in the background whilst doing other things!
Mind, I only ever watch films or anything else on TV as well.
Mike
I would echo the comments re Hislop and Mellish and add Neesom to the list.
My main gripe with RUK are the presenters giving away the results at the start of Racing Replay. I don’t get the chance to watch much live racing do I make good use of the endless replays. But there’s nothing worse than sitting down to watch a really good meeting only for Gordon Brown to start listing some of the runners as you just know that these were the winners. Either that or Nick Luck will open up with "welcome to sandown on a day that Andrew Balding won’t forget".
I now turn the sound down at the start.
You realise how good RUK is when you have to stomach ATR for the St Leger meeting. Adverts, adverts, adverts and the ultra boring Bob Cooper in the studio.
YAWN!
You realise how good RUK is when you have to stomach ATR for the St Leger meeting. Adverts, adverts, adverts and the ultra boring Bob Cooper in the studio. YAWN!
Hear hear going out this weekend so luckily going to miss the tedium that is Donny and the St Leger
You realise how good RUK is when you have to stomach ATR for the St Leger meeting. Adverts, adverts, adverts and the ultra boring Bob Cooper in the studio.
YAWN!
Sir Bob should have been put out to pasture years ago.
There was only once I was entertained during his presenting. This occurred back in the days when there was a racing preview on Sky in the early morning which I watched at breakfast and which was then repeated at intervals in the betting shops via SIS. Of course this was back in the days before there was wall to wall cartoon races where you can back Professor Pat Pending, Rufus Roughcut and The Slagg Brothers in a Trifecta.
The guest that morning was Mark "The Couch" Winstanley and the show was littered with risque comments from the guest, with references such as "The handicapper’s got this colt by the Niagara Falls now Robert" which led to an ever increasing sense of discomfort etching onto the face of Robert (Nytol) Cooper.
What finished Sir Bob off was a section discussing Jockey Club letters to jockeys who were deemed excessive users of the whip. Mark Winstanley chipped in with the comment:- "Do you think Frank Bough will get a letter Bob?" at which the host seemed to recoil with a mixture of puzzlement and disbelief. The Couch repeated the question but he’s still waiting to this day for an answer.
The show swiftly moved to a break and when the "repeats" were shown a few hours later in the betting shops, the whole segment had been re-shot with the Niagara Falls and Frank Bough completely vanished.
A classic piece of uncomfortable TV with long, delicious, awkward silences is probably lost for all time, maybe they can send the arid Mr Cooper to look for it?
Thanks for the good crack. Time for me to move on. Be lucky.
Mike,
I’m with you on the paddock shots – two dimensional shots taken with a moving camera lens from about the worst place to view the horses, i.e from inside the paddock.
In the flesh its three dimensions, you can see the muscle tone and the glow of the skin, you can hold your head still and let the horse walk across your line of vision and you can position yourself so that you get close-up, head on and side on views. You can also get more than one horse in view at a time which helps in comparing size.
It’s like the difference between a dating site and a date.
You learn something everyday, I never knew there was a correlation between the mobility of the presenter/pundit and paddock shots.
However RUK managed to defy this the other day at Carlisle when Mark Howard was in action.
Not sure betlarge & apracing are the normal RUK viewer as one is doing something else most the time and the other hasn’t got it. Paddock shots don’t have to come from within the paddock and on the odd occasions they are used they don’t always come from within the paddock eg Kempton last night.
However useful they are and I like them, paddock shots and horses going to post are certainly preferable to endless waffling from "expert" pundits etc on screen.
However useful they are and I like them, paddock shots and horses going to post are certainly preferable to endless waffling from "expert" pundits etc on screen.
Spot on, seeing horses parade and canter is an enjoyable part of the televisual racing experience; listening to Joe Pundit generally isn’t, though I’m happy to exclude the aforementioned Hislop/Mellish pairing from that generalization
If one has mastered the dark art of rationalizing horse conformation then TV pictures of pretty geegees parading might as well be a Disney cartoon, though said cartoons of them going to post can still be quite revealing
There’s nothing I enjoy more on-course than staring sagely at 3D hocks and withers whilst earnestly scribbling ‘needs the run’ ‘fat as a pig’ ‘gone in his coat’ ‘sweating up’ ‘on his toes’ ‘has the demeanour of one who resented being dragged out of his box this morning’…blah blah: paddock negatives are for this O Level Art wannabe a damn sight easier to quantify than positives, but revision at home on the TV teaches little about either
You realise how good RUK is when you have to stomach ATR for the St Leger meeting. Adverts, adverts, adverts and the ultra boring Bob Cooper in the studio. YAWN!
Hear hear going out this weekend so luckily going to miss the tedium that is Donny and the St Leger
Oi
That’s Doncaster to you! You do not get to call Doncaster Donny and we are far from tedious.We all have our favs and maybe a combination of some of atr and ruk would be great but Matt and Boycy are much better than anything on ruk and don’t patronise people like me who like to think we are very knowledgable on our horses.
edinahib I cannot abide ATR I find Chapman the biggest turn off in racing,even worse than Mccririck.I agree though that outside of Lydia Hislop/Steve Mellish & a few notable others that RUK’s coverage has got worse.Is there a more boring sounding pundit on any sport than David Cleary?
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