The Big Hit On The Small Screen

Matt James finds out how ITV tackles the BTCC.

- Matt James

It’s hard to believe now, but if you had opened these pages in the early 1980s, the chances are that you would have seen plenty of grumbling about the lack of television coverage for the British Saloon Car Championship. Oh, how times change.

In those far-off days, there were fewer channels, no cable nor satellite and that new-fangled internet thing was a pipe-dream for the general public.

Instead, sports fans watched their rationed motor racing on BBC’s Grandstand programme, or up to the mid-1980s on ITV’s World of Sport. ITV went to Donington in 1983 and showed the BSCC race as well as the showpiece Formula 2 event, but the cameras were rarely trained on the championship. Easter Monday 1984 and the BBC filmed F2, F3 and the Fiesta Challenge from Thruxton, but not the then British Saloon Car Championship. Things did start to change and Grandstand showed the final 1986 race, albeit joining the action halfway through. Would BTCC fans stand for that now?

Things improved in 1987 when Neville and Richard Hay put highlights of the whole season on cable channel Screensport, but sitting in his Grandstand presenter’s chair, Steve Rider had realised that the sport’s coverage had a problem.

The first item he introduced in 1985 on BBC Grandstand was a Metro Challenge race, and with contracts for film rights held by circuits and not championships, it was a case of showing selected races from that day rather than a whole championship.

“There was no reference to what had happened in rounds one to five of the championship, and no great concern as to what was going to happen in round six onwards,” remembers Rider. “It was a race selected and shown in a very arbitrary fashion.”