Forum Replies Created
- Posts
The Cheltenham coverage was generally very good and Ed Chamberlin is becoming quite an accomplished host, although still a bit insipid and lacklustre at times.
The grinning and quaintly old-fashioned Francesca Cumani, with her hair up, was polished and competent as well as beautifully spoken. A bigger contrast with the downmarket Tanya Stevenson from Channel 4 days you could not have.
There were several mentions of “my father” from Francesca (the ghost of Clare Balding was evidently on hand) and there was a fawning mention from Ed that she was “racing royalty” during a hand-over to her.
It was a sad sign of the times that we had to endure the Social Station sections, hosted by Alan Partridge doing a passably goofy impression of Oli Bell. Who on earth is interested in what they are saying on Instagram? Why do we have to pander to these people?
Matt Chapman continued to do his poor man’s impression of McCririck with his ludicrous antics, not least when trying to badger a distinctly unimpressed J P McManus into letting his hair down.
Brian Gleeson tried to compete with him in the clowning about by pulling faces and leaning forward to the camera in the style of McCririck at his “Aren’t I funny?” worst.
Alice Plunkett did her C4 bit of being too matey, saying “Listen” and wearing her big Mad Hatter’s Tea Party hats, so no change there.
Sir Anthony McCoy, dubbed “Sir AP” in the captions, proved to be his usual gloomily lugubrious aid to a welcome afternoon sleep.
Veteran ITV presenter from the old days, Brough Scott, 75, was the wise old sage occupying the John Oaksey and Alastair Down role with his looks back.
Thankfully, there seemed to be a lack of his trademark Radio 2-style puns and links, but he looked positively tiny next to Ed and Francesca. I thought it was ventriloquist Ray Alan with his Lord Charles dummy at one point.
But the camera shots were good and the coverage overall was very watchable and efficiently run. ITV have proved the doubters wrong, I have to concede, and the programmes were a credit to them.
It’s just like being at a glorified greyhound track with the appalling viewing.
Lots of courses have bad viewing. Cartmel, Leicester, Stratford and even Southwell with its bad angles spring to mind but Chelmsford takes the biscuit. It’s unforgivable that the main building (you can’t say grandstand) is where it is.
Lessons should have been learned from the Great Leighs temporary grandstand fiasco but no, they had to put a dog racing-style building slap in the wrong place so that you can hardly see anything apart from the closing stages.
It’s fine if all you are interested in is betting inside the hall and watching on TV. The atmosphere is good but anyone who actually wants to watch the races is in for a very frustrating time constantly trying to find somewhere with an uninterrupted view.
You can hardly hear the commentary most of the time.
Even to get to the winner’s circle needs a bit of effort as it’s quite a way from the building. When I went, Essex boy Dave Smith, the ex-racecourse commentator and ex-judge, was interviewing winning connections after races watched by, er, nobody.
The course should get its priorities right and improve the poor viewing before trying to expand its racing programme further.
Whoever thought a hall in the middle of the track was a good idea, even with limited space available, has got a lot to answer for. Mind you, when have the interests of the viewing public ever counted for anything when there’s money to be made?
Matt Chapman really knows how to press the self-destruct button.
Well done to ITV for getting rid of him on Dancing On Ice.
My girlfriend had never heard of him or seen him but she rightly thought he was absolutely awful.Totally over the top, ridiculous intonation and completely lacking in any awareness as to what is appropriate. He doesn’t seem to realise his antics are not funny and just make him look ridiculous.
He keeps getting opportunities but blows them. He had a golden opportunity when taken on as a racecourse commentator but then lost that by completely overdoing it and spoiling his commentaries with the same sort of crazy, immature vocal gymnastics.
The same with trophy presentations. Completely the wrong tone.
He deserves everything he gets in criticism. People don’t want an expanded and more glittering Dancing On Ice spoiled by him pratting about.
Just hope Richard Hoiles doesn’t come to the rescue for more Ivor the Engine narrator impressions as another replacement for Tony Gubba, the previous voiceover commentator on Dancing On Ice.
I’m sure everyone will be as thrilled as I was to read that the awful Matt Chapman will be the commentator for the revived series of Dancing On Ice early next year.
The role was previously filled by the excellent and much missed Tony Gubba.
The thought of Chapman ruining Dancing On Ice as well as, in the past, racecourse commentaries and, currently, ITV Racing has left me feeling distinctly deflated.
He will no doubt be totally over the top, with his ridiculous voice modulations, rather than being quietly authoritative, understated and unassuming, as was the case with Tony Gubba and his successor, tennis commentator Simon Reed.
Marmite Man makes another step forward in his bid for sporting world domination. He is understandably cock-a-hoop. Certainly cock-a-something.
Even Ivor The Engine soundalike voiceover man Richard Hoiles would have been preferable. Perhaps Mr Shouty Man Chapman will have decibels rival Mark Johnson as his deputy. Preferably not Tania Stevenson though.
I’ve never understood why someone with so little talent, negligible broadcasting ability and a failure even to be able to string together a coherent, fluent and grammatical sentence could have so many employers as Tanya Stevenson.
She was an absolute joke and was one of those people who get lucky by having an indulgent boss who over-promotes them. She started as a back room girl who was given a chance reading out the emails on the Morning Line on Channel Four.
If she’s now proving so indispensable that she has been given a behind the scenes jolly providing statistics for ITV, it’s a sad reflection on the state of affairs. Some people just manage to keep clinging on to the gravy train.
We’ll be seeing other Channel Four rejects popping up in the ITV credits next.
How about Simon Holt as a “technical operator” (holding the microphone for the much inferior and smug Richard Hoiles) or the dapper Mike Cattermole as a “make-up consultant” for Francesca Cumani?
But a very good reminder of the old days came when I was watching a race from Cartmel the other day when commentator David Fitzgerald mentioned that the horse leading the field in the big race was partly owned by Varlien Vyner-Brooks.
David will presumably have known that the aged Vyner-Brooks used to be a racecourse commentator in the old days, being the resident commentator at Cartmel before Iain Mackenzie inherited that position.
I was longing for David to add in the phrase “owned by Varlien Vyner-Brooks, who commentated here at Cartmel for so many years” but it never came. I was willing the horse to win for old time’s sake and it duly did. A nice piece of nostalgia for sad types like me ….
Vyner-Brooks was one of the old-fashioned types who worked part-time while having another career (in his case, as a solicitor in Kendal, near Cartmel, I believe).
CrustyPatch, I don’t recall him commentating but (I know it’s hard to believe) Peter Naughton conducted a very good interview with him after his winner. Varlien just has a way with words and reminded me very much of O’Sullevan, the same dulcet tones. I was dumbstruck when he said he used to be a commentator and was a colleague of “The Voice”.
I think you make a good point about David the commentator missing a trick, it would have been a great line to come up with. Maybe he was unaware at the time of the connection (just shows how important preparation is) but maybe he will get the opportunity again in the near future.
Thanks, Yeats.
I’d be surprised if young shaver David Fitzgerald hadn’t known that the aged Varlien Vyner-Brooks was one of his predecessors as a racecourse commentator at Cartmel, given his encyclopaedic knowledge of racing and his liking for adding in all sorts of interesting information into his commentaries.David is becoming something of a budding resident commentator there himself.
No doubt he might have thought that nobody, especially younger racegoers, would be interested in who used to commentate at Cartmel 30 years ago and only mentioned him and the co-owner several times because of the local stable links.
Good to see that Varlien had another winner on the Monday at Cartmel.
Varlien used to be a regular racecourse commentator at Market Rasen, too, and was always impeccably dressed in a double-breasted suit and colourful tie but one of his colleagues told me many years ago that Varlien packed it in because he was fed up with travelling much further afield than his Lake District base.
He was persuaded to make a brief comeback to commentate at Uttoxeter on Easter Monday in the days when they had 16 meetings and were no doubt short of a commentator.
He was of the generation when some commentators did not even bother to find out the first names of jockeys. In one race commentary at Market Rasen, he referred several times to a horse with “S. Johnson in the saddle”. He obviously couldn’t be bothered to find out in advance, as part of his homework, that it was Steve Johnson.
John Budden used to do the same, referring to “W. Worthington” instead of Billy Worthington. But many racecourse commentators of that era, notably the northern-based Bryan Firth, never, ever mentioned jockeys by name in races and when identifying the runners on the way to post and only ever gave the horses’ names and nothing whatever more.
Sir Peter O’Sullevan was undoubtedly the man for the big occasion with his superb voice and sense of occasion.
He, John Hanmer and Julian Wilson made a compelling commentary team in the BBC Grand National coverage for so many years, even though Hanmer’s rasping, laryngitis-type voice and painfully slow, hesitant delivery made it hard to see why he was employed at all, apart from being available because of his behind-the-scenes race-reading and spotting duties for Sir Peter when not behind the microphone.
Sir Peter has been perhaps unfairly lambasted for his mistakes but Julian Wilson made one of the worst howlers during one National when he wrongly said runners were having to dodge a “dead horse”. His commentary was duly edited for the highlights programme to remove the offending phrase.
He also attracted ridicule for saying during a rare BBC visit to Bangor-on-Dee that the runners were passing the stands, before quickly adding “except that there aren’t any”.
The old commentators of yesteryear had a great charm for their quirks (this includes presenters like the comically incompetent John Rickman) and few of them would even get a job interview today compared with today’s technically far superior commentators.
But a very good reminder of the old days came when I was watching a race from Cartmel the other day when commentator David Fitzgerald mentioned that the horse leading the field in the big race was partly owned by Varlien Vyner-Brooks.
David will presumably have known that the aged Vyner-Brooks used to be a racecourse commentator in the old days, being the resident commentator at Cartmel before Iain Mackenzie inherited that position.
I was longing for David to add in the phrase “owned by Varlien Vyner-Brooks, who commentated here at Cartmel for so many years” but it never came. I was willing the horse to win for old time’s sake and it duly did. A nice piece of nostalgia for sad types like me ….
Vyner-Brooks was one of the old-fashioned types who worked part-time while having another career (in his case, as a solicitor in Kendal, near Cartmel, I believe).
He’s one of the last of the older brigade of racecourse commentators from the 1970s and 80s still alive following the deaths of many in recent years, notably Robin Gray, Ken Grainger and Bruce Friend-James.
Favourites
Fontwell (enjoyed some lovely days there with good viewing)
Goodwood (great facilities and beautiful setting)
Wetherby (have enjoyed my visits there)
Market Rasen (good viewing and compact facilities)
Hexham (beautiful rolling countryside)Honorary mention
Folkestone (sadly closed but lovely to visit with goldfish pond and good atmosphere)
Least favourites
Leicester (bad head-on viewing and little atmosphere)
Nottingham (depressing and soulless)
Redcar (no character)
Stratford (very bad viewing wherever I tried to stand)
Chelmsford (nice buildings but appalling that the low-tiered grandstand is so badly placed that much of the viewing is obscured)I don’t quite know why the three race commentators were clearly told not to hand over to each other by name and merely stopped talking when they had finished their part of the course.
Seemed a bit unnecessary unless it was supposedly not to distract from the action. It might happen with course commentaries but never for TV broadcasts on races.
Richard Hoiles just ground to a halt instead of handing over to Mark Johnson, who in turn merely stopped talking instead of handing over by name to Ian Bartlett.
Back in the good old days, Peter O’Sullevan even managed to make “As they race towards the first, it’s over to John Hanmer” sound like a key part of his commentary. Likewise with Julian Wilson and his “They’re very, very tired as we rejoin John Hanmer” in one of his famous National commentaries.
The ITV team sounded second-rate and lacklustre generally but Mick Fitzgerald once again did a good job in identifying the colours and incidents in the post-race replay, a role he also did for the BBC and Channel 4.
Why they entrusted Matt Chapman with the way-too-long presentations announcements, I will never know. Over the top and over dramatic in true Chapman style.
It all seems very lacklustre to me. Ed Chamberlin seems insipid and lightweight with his inane grins and lack of charisma and personality, not to mention his seeming inability to ad lib or show warmth and enthusiasm.
It’s good that they are out in the open and away from the studio setting but it’s all a bit lacking in vitality and excitement.
Assuming all these youngsters can drag themselves away from their selfies, phones and Facebook “likes”, I doubt whether many of the thousands who have doubtless migrated with ease and eager anticipation to the delights of ITV 4 will have found much to enthuse them.
Contrived and annoying schoolboy links from Matt Chapman to Ed, pointlessly calling him “Chief” all the time, will not impress the Instagram-obsessed young viewers.
No wonder the figures are not great, especially as the programmes are so earnest but dull and are hardly readily accessible and visible to passing viewers.
It’s Malcolm Tomlinson’s ridiculous attempts to do a poor man’s impression of Aussie Jim McGrath that annoys me the most.
I think I even heard him use Jim’s phrase “he goes for the persuader” the other week. Using Jim’s phrases, intonation and a poor imitation of his accent in a faltering, weak voice is just ludicrous.
He’s never been known to take a guess at saying who the winner is in a tight finish, even if a couple of feet separate them at the line, although as one of our forum colleagues never fails to remind people, it’s the judge’s job to call the result, not the commentator.
I’m just grateful that Tomlinson hasn’t been asked to do one of his Aussie Jim-style commentaries on the raunchy antics of his glamorous daughter, Eleanor Tomlinson, in Poldark (“… er, powering home, out deeper on the track and going for the persuader, is Eleanor Tomlinson …”)
It never ceases to amaze me how people who claim to be racing fans can actually advocate the closure of racecourses that form part of this country’s uniquely diverse and rich heritage.
Courses variously nominated here for arbitrary closure by supposed racing enthusiasts include the homes of the Derby, the Grand National, the 1,000 and 2,000 Guineas and, in Chester, a historic and uniquely attractive course situated near the Roman walls.
Enthusiasts from other sports such as football or cricket would never openly advocate the closure of even the most dire ground because even the grotty and unfashionable ones are all part of the rich tapestry of the sport. What is it with so-called racing fans with their death wishes?
How many football fans would nominate Anfield, Old Trafford or White Hart Lane for closure whether they supported the teams or not?
As long as the courses are profitable enough to keep going and enough people want to go racing there to make it viable, with non-racing activities helping to subsidise running costs, I can’t see why any should close.
It’s ridiculous to suggest that drunken behaviour should be an excuse to close courses. The answer is to tighten up on security, ban troublemakers and ensure drunken antics are not tolerated rather than penalise the businesses that run the courses and deprive the many well-behaved local racegoers of a day out.
If the Jockey Club, which should be fighting to save courses, not advocating closing Kempton for housing, and racing enthusiasts who claim to love the sport are quite happy to see the venues that host their favourite sport closed down, then we have come to a pretty poor state of affairs.
Who needs enemies with friends like these?
I would hate to see any course close. It’s always a shame when any course closes.
Folkestone was a lovely place to go racing, I always thought. The racing may not have been overly thrilling but it was an attractive place, with the goldfish pond, and had a bit of character.
Leicester, Nottingham and a few others are dreary places but they are all part of the character of British racing.
Seems incredible to me that the Jockey Club, an organisation presumably set up to look after the heritage, diversity, character and reputation of racing should connive in the destruction of a major racecourse when there does not appear to be any financial crisis that has been forced upon it to make closure necessary.
It seems totally unnecessary to close Kempton and who the heck wants yet another all-weather racecourse — at Newmarket of all places? There are only two racecourses there already.
I’d hate to see any racecourse go, whether it is largely unloved or not, and am glad to see Hereford back in action. Shame Folkestone will stay closed but I realise that I will be a lone voice on that.
Certainly a big improvement on the first programme and the omens are now looking very good.
The team looks to have taken action to iron out some of the shortcomings of the first programme from Cheltenham, notably reining in most of the excesses of Matt Chapman, who is now considerably more watchable.
Mick Fitzgerald was very competent as a pundit and it was great that Sir Anthony McCoy was missing from the line-up after his dismal performance at Cheltenham.
There’s a saying that a Scotsman with a grievance is never likely to be mistaken for a ray of sunshine and the same is true of a dour, wet and fed-up ex-champion jockey who doesn’t really want to be there.
It’s surprising how much the lack of HD on ITV4 detracts from the viewing experience but we will have to put up with that until the Cheltenham Festival.
The presence of grinning weather forecaster Lucy Verasamy is totally unnecessary and I suspect she will be quietly dropped.
Wincanton course commentator Ian Bartlett deserves special praise for the excellent way he coped with the thick fog and the way he managed to fill the gaps in impressive and sure-footed style.
The Morning Line replacement show, the Opening Show, made a very good start and was already better to watch.
Toothy presenter Oli Bell did a good job, even though he kept reminding me of a cross between Harry Enfield’s character Tim Nice But Dim and the Spitting Image puppet of Richard Branson.
Victoria Pendleton’s feature was good and boded well for future programmes.
The end of the previous team’s obsession with betting and the absence of the appalling Tanya Stevenson are welcome bonuses.
It’s all now looking very promising.
ITV got off to a really bad start by having the lacklustre team blurred and in soft focus because the opening shots were from cameras that had lots of rain drops on them.
Even Anneka Rice’s cameraman used to use a cloth to wipe the camera during the old Treasure Hunt programmes when it rained. Not doing so created an appalling impression when the three of them were in camera shot and all bleary.
A quick wipe with the cloth a second before they returned to Ed would have done the trick but no! Leave the bleary-eyed shots running.
An absolute waste of time having the grinning weather woman on, holding her hat. Even Mick Fitzgerald, the king of the inane, seemed embarrassed at the pointlessness of it.
And as for Matt Chapman, making a joke about a horse that was a non-runner and having some ridiculous banter about whether a bookmaker was bald underneath his hat was just cringemaking.
Inspired by McCririck but it just didn’t work.The graphics were clear and good. But if this programme is supposed to appeal to a new audience, especially young, easily bored viewers, it will have failed dismally.
In-jokes and weak banter about presenters many people will never have heard of and will care even less about will have cut no ice at all.
And anybody who was so transfixed that they want to hear the smug jokes next week will get a shock if they tune in to the ITV main channel next time. It won’t be there so they will have to know to search it out on the minority sister channel until the Cheltenham Festival.
Poor old Malcolm will be wishing he was delayed a little longer after making a complete horlicks of the third race and calling the wrong horse in front up the straight until the last 100 yards.
I see he re-called the race for Racing UK’s Replay programme.Certainly no surprise that Malcolm Tomlinson messed up yet another commentary. It’s been a regular occurrence over the years. He’s well known for his blunders, especially in tight finishes.
No surprise that he seemingly didn’t leave enough time for his long journey north from East Yorkshire to Kelso either.
It’s a tricky journey at the best of times, without heavy frost, inevitable traffic delays and earlier race starting times.
Surely it should have been obvious to anyone with a responsibility to provide a service to thousands of viewers, whether racing spectators at the course or many more watching on TV and in betting shops, to make an extra effort to turn up on time. Apparently not.
Some other commentators, even with less of a journey to do, would have stayed over nearby the night before to break the journey and minimise the risks of being entirely foreseeable delayed. Stewart Machin springs to mind, often staying, for example, at a hotel very near Haydock when he is commentating at that course.
Meanwhile, anyone who wants to hear how Tomlinson’s stand-in got on can watch the Freeview RUK replays of Kelso tonight and tomorrow.
Massive loss to terrestrial coverage. A world class commentator. Probably the best of them all.
World class he certainly isn’t, that’s patently ludicrous, but he is very good.
He wasn’t called “Languid” for nothing by McCririck. Anyone who has enjoyed his low-key and minimalist racecourse commentaries at places like Plumpton, Lingfield and Brighton would struggle to describe them as world class or even parish class.
He did make more of an effort for his television commentaries, however, and was very competent and engaging. I liked his big race commentaries and he did a good job at Kempton, although his last race was far from error-free.
I would rather listen to him any day than the smug and irritating Richard Hoiles, who will be an absolute pain on ITV. Give me Simon Holt any day. He will certainly be a big loss but he seems to think it was purely because he was too closely associated with Channel 4.
Self-delusional, probably, because Richard Hoiles has been both seen and heard regularly on Channel 4, including looking incredibly cheery and sounding very chirpy at Chepstow today. I fear the worst for ITV.
My girlfriend had never heard of him or seen him but she rightly thought he was absolutely awful.
