Racing’s Alan Partridge bows out after 60 years

It is fair to say that in Derek Thompson, who hung up his binoculars after his final call at Wolverhampton this week bringing an end to 60 years as a commentator, racing didn’t appreciate what it had until it was gone.

Like a long list of people, he has wrestled for years with picking the right moment to ‘retire’ – although he will still commentate in Jersey, continue race-day presentations and, I dare say, open a betting shop for a fat fee if one ever opens again.

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‘Tommo’ has also surprised himself by feeling nothing but quiet relief since calling home Space Bear in the It’s A Photo – Big Fella Maiden Fillies Stakes (a race title concocted from Tommo-isms).

At the end of the month, Tommo, who like his greatest friend Bob Champion survived cancer (2012) and, three years ago, had a stroke, will be 75, old enough to hang up his bins but just too young to have been a true pioneer of radio and television sports coverage, although he presided over plenty of firsts.

Nevertheless, he has worked with some of the greats and there were three decades when, in racing at least, he was ubiquitous, a staple on mainstream terrestrial racing coverage. If a difficult question needed asking, perhaps of a trainer whose horse had just been pipped in the Derby, all the other presenters looked to him.

If you added up all the hours he has spent on live television it would come to years, so it is no wonder there have been a few gaffes along the way.

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These include the one which makes every compilation of television bloopers ever made when, from the At The Races studio where he was presenting, the camera cut to Ludlow where Robert Cooper was waiting to interview someone with very blonde hair, an assistant groundsperson, about the state of the ground.

“Oh, you’ve been joined by a beautiful lady,” said Tommo, interrupting himself.

“It’s actually a man, Derek,” replied the extremely dry Cooper.

“Oh,” whispers a defeated Tommo.

If, as is probably the case, half the population remember Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew more for their ‘leg-over’ commentary on TMS during the 1993 Edgbaston Test than all the serious stuff they did together, then maybe it is no bad accolade to be best remembered for unintentionally amusing the masses.

For Thompson it all began up in North Yorkshire. After the War his dad, Stanley, a flight-sergeant who flew 40 sorties in Wellington bombers, set up a steel business which evidently went well enough to pay for Tommo and his brother Howard to have riding lessons.

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They had a pony each, joined the Cleveland Hunt where they met a young Bob Champion, whose father hunted the hounds and, as a sideline, drove the knacker wagon at Redcar, which enabled the three boys to get into the races for free.

Devoid of anyone to interview one day, John Rickman of ITV racing fame, put a microphone under their noses and asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.

“I said I wanted to be a TV interviewer,” recalls Tommo of the prescient moment. “Bob said he wanted to win the Grand National, and Howard said he wanted to go into the family steel business which he still does. We were probably only 11.”

His father was one of the first point-to-point commentators but halfway through a race at Great Ayton he turned off his mic briefly, turned to his 15-year-old son, told him he could no longer see the runners clearly enough in the back straight and said ‘you take over’ before handing him the microphone. He has had one in his hand ever since.

He did his first racecourse commentary at Market Rasen in 1967, covered Redcar for BBC Radio Teesside and, aged 21, a full-time job at the BBC in London came up to take over from John Motson who was going to Match of the Day.

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He spent the next nine years learning the art and discipline of broadcasting alongside Des Lynam, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Bryon Butler, Alan Parry, Jim Rosenthal and Peter Jones. He was on the David Hamilton show and started a daily racing slot on the Today programme.

“I remember one morning describing something as ‘quite unique’ on the 6.25am slot,” he recalls. “Ten minutes later, Cliff Morgan, the late, great head of sport, rang up and said: ‘Something is either unique or not unique – it can’t be quite unique.’ I’ve never forgotten that!”

In 1973 he commentated on his first Grand National alongside Michael Seth-Smith, Michael O’Hehir and Peter Bromley. Stationed at Valentines, when he handed over to Bromley as they crossed the Melling Road with two to jump, Crisp was still 30 lengths clear of Red Rum. “I think Peter’s description from the last to the line was the best I ever heard,” he remembers.

Ironically by 1981, when his great friend Champion won on Aldaniti, he was already at World of Sport on ITV.

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“I’d been to see him during his cancer treatment. He was lying in bed, unable to get out, throwing up every 30 seconds,” he recalls. “I came out, sat in the car and cried my eyes out. Shortly after the race he rang me from the weighing room and said ‘I’ve been watching you on television, you need to keep improving to keep your job. Got to go now – I’ve got the presentation.’ It was so Bob.”

In 1987 Tommo joined the newly formed Channel 4 Racing as a presenter until, in 2012, he and John McCririck were both sacked. Tommo got the 40-second call telling him his contract was not being renewed while in a car in his pyjamas on his way to hospital for his cancer treatment. “It’s a cruel world sometimes,” he reflects.

But if McCririck went somewhat bitterly, Tommo just got his head down and kept working. Of course there were other downs. No one’s reputation came off worse in the infamous Top Cees libel case in 1998 than Tommo when trainer Lynda Ramsden and jockey Kieren Fallon sued The Sporting Life after accusations that they had ‘cheated’ with the horse three years earlier.

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Having passed on what Fallon had allegedly told him in a pub at a pre-Channel 4 production meeting the following morning, rightly assuming it was all off the record, he was shocked that it later appeared in the ‘Life.’

When the judge disbelieved Thompson, it nearly destroyed him and his career. “It was not a very good moment,” he recalls. “Horrible. I remember going home, getting in the bath and crying. A number of jockeys wouldn’t talk to me but I just told the truth and, actually, though everyone presumes we hate each other, I get on well with Kieren.”

He had sort of made the decision to quit commentating at the end of this year but after a cock-up at Ayr in early January, he brought that forward to July.

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After two general anaesthetics in December, he had refused to stay in a hotel (by his own admission he is too tight with money) so got up at stupid o’clock to drive from Yorkshire to the west-coast course where, tired, he had got his horses in a muddle in the concluding bumper two furlongs out. He had rectified it a furlong later but the damage was done.

“I couldn’t believe the abuse I got on social media,” he says. “Much of it said I should have retired ages ago and I was very down about it. I got muddled but I was getting a bit erratic. Caroline [his wife] said I should go on social media the next day and put the story from my point of view – that got nearly a million views. (Few 74-year-olds have embraced social media quite like Tommo.)

“Having a stroke three years ago has made it a bit more difficult. It hasn’t been as easy as it used to be so we brought it forward six months. I like working and I like making money – my nickname at school was ‘Dosh’ – but I didn’t want people saying I should have packed up years ago. I think I’ve packed up somewhere near the top, although I’ve only put my bins down – I’ve still got the microphone.”

A true professional, the voice of Dubai racing from 1994 to 2000, unstintingly genial, infectiously enthusiastic, the man who famously did not get the memo and beat Prince Charles in a charity race at Plumpton in 1980; someone who outwardly appears to have the skin of a rhino but is, according to his wife, a ‘big softie inside’ and ‘Marmite’ to some. It is doubtful Tommo will ever fully retire.

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Caroline, whom he married two years ago, says: “It takes him three days to switch off.’ Either way, the commentators’ box has lost someone who remains ‘quite unique’.