TV producer

Melanie Leach on filming Champions - a new series going behind the scenes of jump racing - and why jockeys should be as famous as Formula One stars

- Kate Johnson

The challenge and the joy of sports documentaries is that they’re impossible to plan.

At the start of any season, you have no idea what the outcome will be and it’s incredibly difficult to know who to follow and what to expect. You need a production team that’s used to that, because ultimately, the unexpected is what makes great television.

The starting point for the series was that we thought, how is it possible that the most dramatic sport that we have hasn’t been turned into a series?

We wanted to change that, we felt strongly that no sport is more deserving. The stakes in terms of the danger to jockeys are so high, the outcomes so unexpected.

When we started filming, it was quite difficult for some in the racing community.

They were thinking, “Who are they, they don’t know anything?”, which is fair, but I countered that by saying we wanted to make a series that appeals to everyone – not just the people who already love the sport – by making it accessible and easy to understand even if you’ve never been racing.

We tried not to get caught up in technicalities like handicaps and grades of races. We wanted to tell a great story about great characters who put their lives on the line every day to win races.