Heard the one about eight friends who walked into a bar and bought a racehorse?

The story of Showtime is a sporting thriller captured on TV, as Zoé Beaty talks to those who found meaning in a mare

- Zoé Beaty

Anth Freeman had been thinking about popping the question for some time. In the years before this particular night in 2020, he’d been dropping hints, letting the idea settle in a bit. His mates hadn’t been keen on his “pestering”, as he puts it – but at the opportune moment “when we were about six or seven pints in” down at their local pub in Darlington, Anth asked again. “This time it started to get a bit more traction,” he explains.

The next day, they decided to buy a racehorse. Who has one too many and decides to buy a horse? The stars of ITV’s new hit documentary, It’s Showtime, a show about an unlikely group of eight lads and an unlikelier stallion chancing their way on the racetrack – and winning. The following day Freeman set up a WhatsApp group and cold-called Grant Tuer, a racehorse trainer based in Northallerton, North Yorkshire. “He said, ‘Well I’ve got this horse, he’s only £8,000. Do you fancy it?’ And we said, yeah, we do.”

Apart from meeting in their local, the Darlington Railway Athletic Club, and talking about it, or attending York races most years in the decades since they turned 18, the group of friends had no knowledge of what owning a horse would entail, and no idea what would come next.