One of the few advantages of becoming old is that you can go ahead and purchase a DVD box set without worrying whether, like the VHR format, they will become redundant, as you are most likely not going to be here to to fret over the dilemma, or if you are will probably not be in a sound enough state of mind to follow an episode of Columbo, Rising Damp, Van Der Valk, Fawlty Towers, Quincy, Inspector Morse or Man About The House.
What will prove to be the last generation that had a worthwhile number of genuine racing fans contains many souls hoarding large collections of recorded racing on VHR. We taped hundreds of hours of footage, with all races of worth covered including interviews that have long been forgotten.
A Cheltenham Festival in the early 1980's when Julian Wilson was given a demonstration of a newly designed recall system intended to deal with false starts. It involved blinking lights and a siren. The facial expression on Wilson accompanied by a dry observation made it clear he was unimpressed. It was never introduced.
On to the following decade when replays of Ascot Gold Cups were being shown with Wilson doing a talk over narration, which he was not expecting, as when they moved to a renewal with the commentary from the day, you heard Wilson snap, " Listen, I don't want this bloody talkback ! ".
Many will find that if they have still clung on to their VHR collection they'll discover that they are full of mould and either past the point of no return, or too costly to be salvaged, with too few hours in the day to follow a You Tube tutorial and try and salvage yourself. The next step would be to find a discontinued VHR to DVD copier on the likes of e-bay, and edit properly, as you'll find some peculiarities such as an episode of Sons And Daughters in between the Welsh National and Challow Hurdle, or one of Prisoner Cell Block H separating the Imperial Cup from the Supreme Novices Hurdle.
Most will be aware that there are saviours out there in the form of some You Tube contributors who have uploaded a wide, impressive collection of material, with Espmadrid a legend for many. Eddie Cr has also uploaded some terrific stuff.
Some of these have extended coverage and it was pleasing to see they have those memorable post race interviews from the 1983 Cheltenham Gold Cup. Jonathan Powell's with Graham Bradley is a cracker and makes you realise how futile these present day tacky immediate post race interviews with the jockey aboard really are.
Likewise, it's delightful to stumble upon a race that you have not seen since the day. Henbit's Chester Vase. Looked a bit of a clumsy boat to me but connections knew better and went to Epsom with him. And for the first time since the day of the race I've watched the full running of Ile de Bourbon's 1978 King George Queen Elizabeth Stakes, and the final few hurdles of Night Nurse's 1975 Irish Sweeps Hurdle. The last time I watched that was on the day of the race on Christmas Grandstand.
It cannot repeated enough that once you take the sport to heart, you will be punting on horses for a lifetime which is what is required on a wide scale for the sport to be able to continue to operate on its present scale.
A point worth raising about viewing old clips, and one in which racing holds an advantage over other sports, is that it takes only a matter of minutes to view even the long distance events. This means that you can watch the whole event unfold from start to finish.
Football, cricket and rugby fans cannot watch several full matches in one sitting. They'll search through the matches, watching abridged versions with many just showing the goals, wickets and boundaries, and tries.
The television companies must have vast archives of material. They should stuff copyright and allow open access. Let's face it, no one is going to be able to make a living flogging quality copy pirate tapes in their local pub of, for example, the 1986 Flat Season, no matter how vintage it was, so it should not be an issue.
Whether the BBC have retained all their reels is also an unknown. I believe the established television companies went about the task of digitilising their archive, but whether the beeb retained all of their originals may be doubtful as they washed their hands of the sport.
While it may be true that the healthy crowds who attended both days of the Cheltenham October meeting were genuine racing fans, the vast majority probably reside in the Cotswold catchment area that would have a larger percentage of racing enthusiasts per head of the region than most other areas.
Therefore to use this as a sign that all is well within the sport is misleading. In short, while they will likely contribute well to the sport through punting, they make up a declining portion of the betting fraternity compared with the masses amongst the emerging generations who see betting as mostly about football, supported by the likes of cricket, tennis, rugby, golf, snooker, darts and the like.
We know ITV have an endless archive of racing going back many years, including the C4 era. We see bits of pieces of it, a few seconds here and there. If they really want to save the continuation of the sport at its present level then it would do no harm for them to make it accessible to all.
Repeating what they wish audiences to believe in the form of factual statements serves no useful purpose. For below the glossy exterior the sport has never been in a more precarious state than it is at this very moment.
image reproduced inder CC BY -SA 2.5 AU
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