Episode 2 will get ITV viewers interested - 'The love life of Paul Nicholls'.....Had more Woman than Warren Beatty and Kieron Fallon combined..Fact.

Watched episodes 2 & 3 on itv x as I didn’t have the patience to wait until Friday. It does get better tbf and is quite a good watch.

The itv presenter talking heads, mostly repeating each other, or repeating what has just been said by a trainer or jockey, are both unnecessary and annoying, they ruin it for me. It’s a shame that the majority of it is retrospective interviews too. There is some good raw footage though, that makes it worth watching.

Would have been far more interesting if they had used more of that footage, filmed when emotions were high. I think it’s a bit too boring in its current format to capture public imagination, but who knows.

Userscreaming from beneaththewaves • July 20, 2024 2:07 PM BST
I thoroughly enjoyed it while I was watching it. It's only now I've read this thread that I realise how bad it was.

Jeez

Thought it wasn't that bad tbh.

Sanitized guff, trying to attract new blood to the game without addressing the prickly issues, as yet anyway. Did they put a postscript up informing the viewer that Shishkin had since suffered a rather uncomfortable demise or that the affable shark had courted notatiety by parading a dead horse through the streets.

How about screening at least one horse falling then rather than countless unseats.

How would the program been edited if a tragedy had befallen last years King George, Oh I see, that day would have been shelved from the documentary.

Market Rasen credits the crowd of 9,000 on saturday, up from 7,500 last year down  to the documentary shown the night before. 

if that's the case, got to be good for racing.

we all loved the seventies / eighties when racing nostalgically was in it's prime in our eyes but like many other things in life that's just what it is , nostalgia.






People in the 70s or 80s would also recall the 50s and 60s as an even greater era for the popularity of the sport. Nostalgia is never what it used to be.

Agree sparrow , i don't do nostalgia personally but we continually hear how great everything used to be in horse racing with no balance offered , thinking particularly coverage wise when we relied on waiting for a crappy teletext service for results , live terrestrial coverage not waiting for the SP before darting off to skiing from the Alps and of course waiting for the weekend when we might just get some live racing coverage and see some horses or else visiting betting shops to hear some guy spend 90% of the race howling about the last furlong so that he mentions every horse in the race , those memories are more dark ages than nostalgia for me.

In modern times by comparison we have it so good that a jockey pronouncing a horses name differently to the rest gets highlighted as a program negative , give me strength.

I don't have a problem with the positivity Hayden but the show was spinning something that is fake, a false premise. For multiple reasons. Racing is no longer about David vs Goliath, it's which owner has the deepest pockets and a handful of galactico trainers. The KG is not really an important race any more and dines off its nostalgia. We will never see scenes of kauto, best mate or dessie again. Betting is central, critical to the sport but I assume this series will completely ignore it as they are trying to marginalise sports betting as being socially uncomfortable.

It does actually seem quite jarring to me that itv ostensibly supports horse racing as they hate pretty much anything else that threatens to be traditional, English/British heritage.

It was the opening part of the series, but ordinarily they push what they see as the primary content out on the debut of a series. Perhaps there will be some progression on the content.

Cider , respect you posts mate as always but the false premise bit and showing something is fake is surely something for a newbie to digest further down the line , if those Market Rasen extras are kosher i'll bet those 1,500 won't be remotely interested in the David vs Goliath scenario , maybe a few years down the line but initially to be drawn it'll be the like of watching horse racing with a small financial interest , the fact of deepest pockets and how the industry works now seems fairly irrelevant to probably 90% of punters as they either no interest in that deeper knowledge or else fail to see how that affects their daily yankee.

What we need really for balance is some feedback from a few of those Market Rasen extras.   

Still , we slightly disagree but without hurling insults after more than one exchange , must be a forum first   

Nostalgia is a wonderful feeling, it wraps it's arms around you and carries you away

Market Rasen would say that though, wouldn't they? What was more important to the crowd, the programme on friday, or the weather?

I don't think I have heard a negative word about the programme from the industry. A few cheerleaders on here have obviously felt the need to join in.

Any success from an ITV point of view will be measured in viewing figures. I think 1.4 million was given out. Let's see how that compares with the next five weeks. How does it compare to viewing figures for whatever is normally shown at 9.00 pm on a friday? If it's a lot lower then I don't see how they can justify putting it on. They're not going to be too bothered about a couple more people having a day out at Market Rasen.

That's another way of looking at it though dd in that you've picked out the main positive posted by ashleigh and immediately written it off as lies , it may well be fabricated i've no idea but just saying.

Also the comparison with what's normally on the main channel at 9pm doesn't feel right , it's a minority sport so the figures are always going to be millions behind say a new episode of Midsomer Murders whichever channel it's showing.

I'd prefer to think that someone somewhere has done extremely well to convince the channel to give them a 9pm slot   

raspberry scenario is garbage, no one or next to no one goes to the races with 24hrs notice.never mind nearly 25% of your entire crowd

its ridiculous staements like this from raspberry that make racing look like idiots when in a few months time chambers and itv etc tell us how racing is struggling, a spotanious day at the races within 24 hrs will be north of £200+ without a bet

you,d need to no the weather,other sporting events,local attractions from last yr before you compare numbers,was last yr 1st weekend of school hols etc,etc

I, like many on here, found my way to horse racing through betting. When I was young it wasn’t the spectacle of the Grand National that I looked forward to, it was the fact that I got to place a bet on it.

Racing, both horse and greyhound, is still the best betting sport imo.  Even into my late teens I was still a far bigger football fan than racing. It wasn’t until I started betting on racing regularly, and started finding out about all the different ways that you could bet on it, that I became really interested in it. Interested enough to start reading up and finding out more about it.

If attracting young people is the aim, then I think a documentary about gambling on horse racing, would have far more cut through than one just about the sport. If they showed people betting, and showed all the different ways you can bet, and sometimes win on the sport. On course punters, the betting ring, shop punters, arbors, in runners, online gamblers, form readers, matched bettors, price traders, drone users, exchange shops, fast pics, high rollers and just regular punters who do it for fun. Make a documentary about the wide range of people and the various different methods of betting on the same sport.

Obviously not going to happen in this day and age, but most people I know, from a non racing background, got into it purely through betting. The brave jockey and well looked after horse theme doesn’t really seem to sell the sport very well, and if anything, seems a bit patronising to the people that they are trying to get interested. Because the fact is, for the majority of people, the main reason they are interested in a horse race, is because they have had a bet on it.

Either that or just hire a Tina Turner tribute act for after the racing.

Championship jockey / trainer…Dan,Paul,Harry,Sean…..zzzzzzz

Confetti scattered for overpriced geldings ffs…..

Nico posh boy swearing on camera….

Bryony looking good…..big deal…