SOMETHING BLOKEY THIS WAY COMES?

Just over a week has passed now since the news broke of ITV wresting the rights to terrestrial televised racing from Channel 4, and inevitably a lot of the talk since then - a disproportionate quantity, to this observer - has diverted down the route of the merits of the presenting teams from both of those channels, past, present and future.

Please God this blog post doesn't provide too much more of the same, but apologies if so.

First things first.  Whoever IMG had got in (or retained) for the relaunched Channel 4 Racing would have had to follow the same editorial, presentational and stylistic remit. Unless we can be unequivocal that this current remit would have suited the Highflyer-employed team any better than the IMG-employed one, the conclusion I’d draw is that the current incumbents are the best people for the job at hand.

How good or not they are isn’t the issue – they’re meeting the expectations of them. The show’s producer Carl Hicks doesn’t ask the team for knockabout irreverence. Accordingly, his on-screen employees don’t provide it.

I had to raise at least one eyebrow at a comment made last weekend in the Racing Post by Andrew Franklin, head of Channel 4 Racing for its first 28 years of existence, praising the former Highflyer team for maintaining a dignified silence in the years since their replacement.

This almost a year to the day since he’d torn a strip off IMG’s falling ratings in the same publication, and barely 48 hours since John Fairley, his former wingman on the show, had done the same in much more abrasive terms.

All this without forgetting, of course, a certain Mr McCririck’s ultimately doomed legal challenge – hardly quiet, meek acceptance.

Loyalty to Franklin, incidentally, was the key driver behind John Francome’s decision not to accept any offer (were any forthcoming) to join the IMG-produced product, and it’s improbable that his position will soften with the move to ITV and ITV4 unless Franklin is at the helm. The 5/1 price quoted in places for the return of Francome thus represents dire value as far as I’m concerned.

As for the aforementioned McCririck, I expect that the relative lack of interest in the opinion pieces that he has uploaded to his Youtube channel won’t have gone entirely unnoticed by the would-be employers at ITV, with a number of pieces still struggling to rack up even a triple-figure number of views a month after upload. Mention of the channel in Robin Gibson’s column in the Post last Sunday doesn’t appear to have made any material difference.

There’s appreciable desire on one other forum I frequent for the emphasis on betting to be reduced once the coverage of racing passes to ITV/ITV4. For better or for worse, that’s the very last thing I expect will happen.

ITV simply isn’t able to adopt that same lofty position as the BBC could during the 1970s and 1980s in particular, whereby they didn’t so much as acknowledge the existence of SPs beyond any mention Sir Peter O’Sullevan may have made of them and had no commercial imperative to do so (q.v. a useful historical piece on TV racing coverage by Brough Scott, again in last Sunday’s Post).

ITV Racing will get the bookies and exchanges onside, be that directly through the making available of advertising slots or indirectly through extensive lip service to betting mediums during the programme itself, because they daren’t not.

Furthermore, consider just what the provenance is of ITV4. To all intents and purposes, this is the TV channel formerly known as Granada Men & Motors, which should give away plenty about whom it regards as its target audience.

If in any doubt, however, a helpful information sheet buried within the ITV Media website contains a few salient lines, reproduced verbatim:

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ITV4 is a haven of sport and cult classics, feeding your inner fan.

At its heart, ITV4 has an extensive range of incredible sporting action including the UEFA Euro 2016 Qualifiers, French Open tennis, Tour de France cycling, Isle of Man TT motorbike racing, Formula E motor racing, Masters Darts, Aviva Premiership rugby and Rugby World Cup. Sporting documentaries such as Sports Life Stories also offer unprecedented behind the scenes insights into the lives of sporting legends.
Other important channel offerings include cult classic Magnum P.I., US acquisitions Storage Wars and Pawn Stars, and action-packed blockbusters such as Bond films and Fight Club.

The channel’s core audience is 25-44 year old males looking for great escapism that’s an antidote to the everyday.

Channel Highlights
– Weekly reach of 10.6m, 6.2m Men
– Strong Male profile with 62% of all viewers being Men
– Tour de France final day was watched by 1.2m and a 7% share
– ITV4 is the 6th biggest digital channel for Men
– ITV4 had its highest ever all time and prime time share for 16-34 Men for Q1 in 2015
– ITV4 is having its highest ever prime time share for 16-34 Men since launch so far in 2015
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Those, like I, who have enjoyed the channel’s coverage of the tennis and cycling will already know that ITV4 manages to ply its trade nowadays without being quite so unwittingly (and almost parodically) Clarkson-esque, Blokey Bloke Bloke as it did during its Men & Motors incarnation.

Knuckles have finally been picked up from off the ground, and by some distance.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t alter my view that the sort of people ITV(4) is gunning for with the racing broadcasting are far less likely to be the more mature or bucolic devotees among the Highflyer-era Channel 4 Racing viewing audience, and far more the blokes who pop up every 15 minutes at the moment telling us that this is the Ladbrokes Life.

It’ll be after people (men and women, one hopes, despite the channel’s marked male reach) of a certain age, with as much of a propensity to spend the leisure pound on a punt as on anything else.

I’d expect the temptation will be great to cast people of a comparable age as presenters and pundits, too.

I don’t even think it’s too far-fetched to suggest that there may yet be some eyeing up (if there hasn’t been already) of what works on Sky Sports’ flagship Soccer Saturday, with a view to tapping in to the same sort of market or even tempting some of it into channel-hopping between it and the horses.

The news that the ITV4 coverage stands a strong chance of being studio-based does immediately suggest an in-house presenter-pundits-presenter model, albeit with the one big difference to Soccer Saturday of still showing the live action rather than have said pundit screaming excitedly at a monitor visible to him/her only.

Even so, how soon before the living room set resonates to the cries of "they'll be dancing in the streets of Ffos Las tonight, Jeff...", or similar?