Racing Post TV

rorydelargy

rorydelargy

At the Start
Joined
May 15, 2005
Messages
3,806
Location
London
Does anyone look at this?

One of my horses to watch (Ikorodu Road) was running last week at Newbury so I went to the meeting with my girlfriend (not actually Shadow Leader, for those who might be interested, although she introduced us, ironically enough) to see it run but sadly we got a puncture and missed the race. I noticed that RPTV had a feature on last week's eyecatchers called Video Notebook, so thought I'd have a look and see if said race was part of the issue.

What I found was a desperately bad piece done by Peter Scargill, apparently in either a huge rush or under duress as he looked desperately keen to be elsewhere. One of his horses to follow was Old Benny, who was unplaced in the Pertemps qualifier. Starting with gems of knowledge like "he's a slow horse; he's probably got feet the size of dinner plates" as if that meant anything, he rounded off his recommendation with the following (verbatim) phrase:

"....importantly I think, he's sort of 14, 16/1 for the Welsh National which, sort of, connections were, sort of veering towards in their, sort of pre race comments and you know, 14 or 16/1 about a horse that hasn't run for 587 days, I thought was significant"

I don't like to criticise broadcasters willy-nilly as it's not the easiest job and I'm more than aware that I'm no more capable than most of analysing races verbally, but this is absolutely appalling stuff with no redeeming feature, either in its delivery or production. It could be a genuinely useful piece if a degree of thought went into it, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
 
Rorydelargy, what you need to remember is, that in order to become a racing journalist or broadcaster you only need to:

A) Have been to public school,

and

B) been voted "cutest boy in the dormitory" at least once.

You certainly are not required to be able to speak or write coherently.
 
Venusian said:
Rorydelargy, what you need to remember is, that in order to become a racing journalist or broadcaster you only need to:

A) Have been to public school,

and

B) been voted "cutest boy in the dormitory" at least once.

You certainly are not required to be able to speak or write coherently.
Click to expand...
I should, you know, give up now.

Mr Scargill is certainly not an ex public schoolboy. I actually had to check whether there was indeed a racecourse in "Noobry". It's not particularly an attack on him (or his cockney tones), but on whoever thought this was a great concept and then decided "Feck it - let's just cobble any old crap together".
 
Some of the stuff that appears on there I was pleasantly surprised at, but there is a lot of on there that isn't the best. I guess the trouble is, they have got an office full of trained print and/or online journalists, then decide to build a TV studio in there and stick virtually anyone in there without sufficient training.

As it's not live, there isn't any excuse for the sort of output you have quoted.
 
Well, whatever their backgrounds or abilities, racing journalists and broadcasters rarely make much of an effort to produce anything memorable.

Noobry or Newbray, it makes "feck" all difference.
 
If you want to see how arsehole-bunchingly bad RPTV can get, take a look at the Winstanley ante-post pieces for the Tingle Creek.
 
You guys have really cheered me up, been laughing while viewing some of this stuff. My cat could do better. But then, my cat is cute, and has been well educated. :lol:
 
Back
Top