A tip is an area of wasteground set aside for the dumping of unusable and unwanted goods. In recent times, tips have been rebranded as recycling facilities and liberally adorned with green signs and flashy logos. Similarly, the tips you find in your racing papers are these days portrayed as ‘giving the punter what he wants’.
The logic proceeds thus: Man in the betting shop is dumb. Dumb people generally don’t like thinking for themselves and are in any case far too busy being dumb to devote too much time to anything else, because lets face it, Dumb eats up a lot of your day. Therefore what the dumb man in the betting shop requires from a racing newspaper is lots of big headlines telling him what to do with his money.
The same logic holds sway at the BBC. The public pay their licence fee so they should get what they want. And the BBC knows what people want, because people are stupid, aren’t they. Viewers have the intellectual capacity of a Brontosauras in a coma, therefore they need their television liquidised into easily digestible chunks. The BBC will defend to the death the right of people they look down upon to vegetate in front of trashy television.
At the BBC the problem is that the ratings are a pretty blunt instrument. They tell you what the most popular programmes are. But a human being is a tricky customer. We tend to carry around in our brains many different interests, some of which are lying dormant, some of which are only latent. Better and more intelligent market research could tell the BBC that its audience is more than a mass of soap-opera loving invertebrates.
At the Racing Post, there is no excuse. Racing and betting upon racing is a niche, specialised market. Both the sport of racing and the world of betting are fascinating, in-depth subjects, worthy of ongoing, nuanced, detailed and entertaining treatment. Maybe the man in the betting shop does like to follow a certain tipster. But how much better it would be if he were given the tools to be his own tipster, or at least to tackle the game he spends his money on with more intellectual ammunition.
And this is where the criticism of the Racing Post is most pointed and most cutting. The Post’s best columnist Paul Haigh has left the paper and gives as one of his reasons the fact that it is now essentially a bookmaker’s broadsheet. Bruce Millington and his cohorts are not holding back on giving the punter an informed and interesting publication because they think it will be bad for circulation; they are pedalling the same old tipster-driven trash because their main advertisers want it so. They need people to bet, but they don’t need them to think. Punters deserve better.
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I agree. Sometimes it's laughable. I enjoy a good trawl through the Post and I used to work for it, so I know a little about the background. There are a couple of very good writers on there, it does well on the poetic stakes, but this needs to be balanced with good, practical, even cynical advice. It's hard for them to really write hard-nosed stuff (though Paul Haigh did a bit) because of the mortal fear they have of libelling trainers who are indulging in, shall we say, "gamesmanship". The bookies are the puppet-masters cos of advertising. I like the paper, but an enterprising chap with lots and lots of dough could probably knock it for six by producing a cheaper rag called THE PUNTER'S FRIEND, with a lot more practical advice. I think Richard Birch's column on a Saturday has a lot of potential as an opinionated and two-fisted column, but that's hidden away in the sports supplement...
ReplyDeleteRegarding your post at the Racing Forum about the Formbook (I can't reply there as I'm banned from posting because I wrote some satirical things about Racing Post tipsters and spotlighters), if knowing the formbook was the answer to winning then all the bookie's would go under. Yes, certain races can be sussed on some form study; others can't. Take the horse Pugnacity this week. It only sticks out because there was nothing in its form to say it was going to do what it did at its price. Someone knew something cos its price dropped like a stone and it won - 'in complete, shocked silence' as the Ladbrokes commentator said...
Thanks William
ReplyDeleteThere are, of course, some good things in the Post. Alastair Down is a decent writer, but prone to lapse into cliche - some of his Cheltenham witterings are gut-wrenching.
But whereas it should be the industry bible, a towering but neutral institution, where all of the issues of the day are given a thorough airing and where betting theories and ideas are elaborated; it seems to be becoming an advertising supplement with some tipsters. I also wonder whether they really need to print the full racecards, since such information is so freely available elsewhere. But what would they fill the gap with?
I would certainly subscribe to The Punters Friend. Slip in a few sentimental stories of life in the old days and you might steal some of The Peoples Friend more short-sighted readers.
Funny thing about this 'form book' business. I started getting into betting by reading Mordin and Potts who, more or less, indicated that said form book should be thrown out the window. Yet one or two on TRF talk about it as though the form book was a holy scripture, which only a few are able to interpret. As you say, there are other, darker forces at work sometimes.