THE RACETECH ROUNDABOUT AND THE LAST (VERY) LONG WORD ON THE FILLY FACTOR

The announcement in the Racing Post on July 22nd of the Commentator User Group's latest deliberations brought the ambitions of some Racetech roster aspirants closer to realisation, and others crashing down to Earth rather abruptly.

The news of Tim Peters' and particularly Gareth Topham's likely acceleration towards securing racecourse engagements even before the end of this calendar year is a most welcome development.  The latter has been honing his craft for well over a decade now although still only 23 years of age, and an answering of an SOS call for a commentator at the Point-to-Point at Aspatria six years ago - despite his living 306 miles and over five hours away in Cardiff at the time - served as an early and very real statement of intent where putting in the hard graft to further a career is concerned.

A full-time place on the roster seems to have slipped through the grasp of three other hopefuls, however, judged by the same Racetech correspondence as bore Peters' and Topham's good news.  In the final analysis, the excitable delivery of Matt Chapman may well have proven too much for the palates of at least some of those at the venues where his 15 probationary commentary stints took place between February and June; and one incident at Hereford in May, in which he appeared to call a horse that slithered off camera but never fell as a faller, looked at this remove (rightly or wrongly) to hint at a reliance on monitor pictures that perhaps wouldn't have been expected in a four-runner race. 

No matter - Chapman's gifts as anchor and interviewer definitely have their fans within the racing media's other employers, and his resident Chapman TV engagement at Towcester is better received than previously as the owners, trainer and riders he is likely to approach have become increasingly familiar with the format.

Gary Capewell has, like Chapman, been taken off the commentators' programme after six months' worth of probationary stints this year, but to this pair of ears seems unlucky not to have been granted the same full year accorded John Blance, the latter thus becoming the first contracted addition to the roster since David Fitzgerald 18 months earlier.

There didn't seem to be anything to split Capewell and Blance on the evidence I'd heard.  Each are as likely to run through an entire field of silks as the other; both are able to crank up both noise and excitement levels in a tight finish without resorting to white noise or screaming (in that regard, Capewell's excited but well-poised commentary of a dead-heat in a Uttoxeter bumper in mid-June is surely one for his personal portfolio); and - should such things matter either way - both are possessive of clear, pleasant and unobtrusive regional accents.  Unless some calamitous error befell Capewell on one of his remaining try-outs, the case for releasing him seems hard to fathom.

Capewell and Chapman had at least got as far as a probationary period of racecourse commentary, something which the third departure from the training programme, Hayley Moore, had not (guest appearances at Brighton and Lingfield, plus at the Point-to-Points at Charing and Catsfield, not really amounting to the same thing).

The news of the halting, for now at least, of Moore's progress towards becoming a fully-fledged commentator will inevitably be greeted with glee by those who insisted the awarding of her with a place on the commentators' training scheme for winning Lovetheraces's much-trumpeted Filly Factor competition was an affront to other commentators aspiring to the same goal via more established means; and also by that hardcore of observers convinced that the female voice, every last example of it, is simply ill-suited to the pitch, speed, modulation and rigours of commentary.

For me, however, there is little to gloat or cheer over in this outcome.  My hopes were very much pinned on "Hayley Moore, commentator" confounding the expectations of many/most and succeeding, and those hopes endured for a number of reasons.  First of all, quite simply, the prospect of her not succeeding and potentially hardening attitudes against the concept of female racing commentators for however long thereafter was too depressing to contemplate.

Secondly, and regardless of whether it's predicated more or less on the listening experience than on some unabashed feminist tendencies, I'd reckon to be more sympathetic than most where the notion of female sports commentators overall is concerned.  I could listen to Donna Symmonds and Alison Mitchell commentating on the cricket all day, and I'd take Jacqui Oatley's clear and well-researched delivery on the football over the stentorian bombast and white noise of a Jonathan Pearce or Alan Green any day of the week.

Put another way: if I really wanted a middle-age man screaming very loudly at me for short sharp bursts, I'm sure Napalm Death are still touring.

Thirdly, what Filly Factor was setting out to achieve was not that far removed from a prospective TV format myself and a friend had started to develop in early 2009, before my and her respective work commitments required us to mothball the project (some way, alas, before it was in a fit state to pitch to anyone).  It was, therefore, a competition I watched with an inordinate, and perhaps disproportionate, amount of interest, and on that basis I thought it a shame that it was not better received.

I cannot pretend that everything about the execution of Filly Factor especially pleased me, however.  Far from it, in fact, and the litter of shortcomings that follows is by no means assumed to be exhaustive:



1)  The name.  "Filly Factor"?  Really?  Urgh!  Whatever virtues of the empowerment of aspiring female sports commentators the competition's creators may have wanted to extol did sadly get diluted somewhat by that title alone, one which couldn't help but conjure images of a simpering flibbertigibbet gushing into the microphone whilst some drunken steward slapped her tweed-clad backside.  Not a helpful start.


2)  The Filly Factor commentary upload site.  There was always a chance that some of the initial submissions at the contest's earliest stage were going to be dreadful.  That goes for any talent contest one could name, though - goodness knows The X-Factor makes several weeks' play out of exactly that every season.

In the case of the Filly Factor, however, it may have been more judicious not to have uploaded every last submission onto the site until at least some quality filtering had taken place, i.e. one round into the contest.  For those sceptical about the competition before it even launched, being presented with a portfolio of poor performers in the first instance - with the better ones buried in there somewhere - wasn't ever going to persuade them to be any better predisposed towards it.


3)  The competition programme.  I can't recall there being a timespan of much more than two months from the initial harvesting of showreels to the grand final at Ascot.  If it was longer, it wouldn't have been much longer, and to expect that to be enough time to produce an outstanding performer was perhaps fanciful.

I can quite understand why it didn't run for longer - keeping it compact upheld interest better than some monthly heat over the course of, say, each of six to nine months.  Even allowing for that quick turnover, though, a major failing of Filly Factor was that the quantity and variety of challenges the competitors undertook didn't seem to be anywhere near exhaustive enough:

•     There was a bias towards Flat meetings that the time of year in which the contest was held cannot fully explain away.  If there's jumping 12 months a year as well as Flat, there is no reason why the competitors couldn't have been packed off to a Worcester or Uttoxeter (or for a real challenge from a badly located commentary box, Perth).  Hayley Moore's guest calling of a steeplechase at Lingfield in November was believed to be her first National Hunt commentary live at a Rules track, four months after winning Filly Factor, which rather drives home the point.
•     There was no challenge based at a Point-to-Point meeting, and during the early weeks of the competition at least there were still such fixtures on the go.
•     Unless I missed it, there was no "blinky monitor" test, wherein a competitor had to prove how well she could uphold a commentary when a specially tampered-with monitor packed in at random.
•     I can't remember too many challenges having taken place in bad weather conditions.
•     I'd have liked a test where each competitor was given a match to commentate on, too, to see how creative yet relevant a way they could fill the time (using something like Richard Hoiles's superb call on the two-runner renewal of Cheltenham's Dipper Chase in 2010 as the benchmark of quality).

All of these tests, in one form or another, featured in the format my co-conspirator and I had devised way back when. Some may have worked better in practice than others, but none would have been detrimental in helping to provide a more rounded winner experientially.


4)  The location of the final.  Hosting Filly Factor's denouement at a high-profile Ascot meeting was an injudicious move and one in particular that could quite reasonably have had some current incumbents on the Racetech roster fuming, seeing as how commentating at the Berkshire track is something that will forever remain an unrealised ambition for some of them.

It's hard to argue the stated aims of the competition would have been undermined to any great extent had the final taken place at, for example, a Friday summer evening meeting at Newmarket.  The (in all likelihood) decent sized fields, a big crowd and a high-spirited atmosphere would have made the day still feel like an event to the finalists, whilst at the same time not gifting them anything that much more out of the ordinary than they might be asked to cover if ever making it onto the roster proper.


5)  The prize.  LoveTheRaces dubbed Filly Factor as the pathway to becoming "Britains first female racing commentator".

Apart from being historically inaccurate (there have been examples from - famously - Mirabel Topham in one Grand National to Katie Stephens deputising for the AWOL Kel Mansfield at Exeter in 2003), I wonder if that billing gave the wrong impression - that, say, ascension onto the Racetech roster was pretty much a fait accompli for the competition's winner, neatly circumventing all the recognised and standard training procedures other mere mortals have to undertake.

The competition offered no such fast-tracking, and the LoveTheRaces report on Hayley Moore's victory did actually make it plain that she won a place on the commentators' training course rather than the roster itself.  The latest developments have, of course, served to prove that there was never even the guarantee that she or any of the other 2012 course intake would be promoted to fully fledged racecourse commentator status thereafter.

However, that there were enough excited/outraged comments on cyberspace at the time of the competition claiming that the winner would be employed on a par with the Hoileses, Holts and Hunts of this world in no time at all suggests either a lot of putting together of two and two and making five on their part, or else that the LoveTheRaces marketing of Filly Factor didn't make sufficiently, unambiguously clear from the get-go what the precise constituent parts of the winner's prize were (and more importantly weren't).

 
The prospects of a repeat run of Filly Factor any time soon may not be all that high, even as part of a broader-remit competition where both a new female and male caller are each sought - the one remaining major difference between this contest and the one my colleague and I were proposing.  Nor, as far as I'm aware, has there been the anticipated swell of aspiring lady callers submitting tapes to Racetech in the aftermath of Filly Factor; though here I'd admittedly be holding up the discrepancy between the stated intentions and the actual deeds of a small pool of female friends as sole supporting evidence.

A detail lost in all of this is that there is actually already one woman out there who is easily capable enough of giving racecourse commentary a concerted go (and becoming the trailblazer that Filly Factor couldn't produce) - not least as her excellent work on tennis (in particular) for Five Live year in, year out proves her timbres and vocal dexterity are both perfectly well suited to commentating on fast-paced sports often requiring quick but measured changes of tone.  

Sadly for us, though, it's hard to see Clare Balding committing to, say, 80 days of roster work per annum when so much of her time is taken up with being highly competent at a million and one other things.  Could we perhaps clone her?