Auntie Beeb: The Punter's Favorite

I hardly ever bet on the horses, but I make an exception for the Grand National, the famous four-mile horse race that is one of Britain's most popular sporting events.



Every year, the BBC does the nation proud with wall-to-wall coverage of the 150-year-old race, airlifting an outside broadcast unit of 52 cameras to Aintree, near Liverpool, equipped to provide BBC1, BBC2, Radio Five Live, local BBC radio, BBC World Service, and worldwide websites with all the action.



The public just loves it, with bumper viewing figures of 9.5 million for the TV broadcast, as the nation goes crazy for horse racing. The world and his mother have a punt, with all the details of the betting intricately relayed by the able and wise correspondents of Auntie Beeb (as we Brits like to call the BBC). To call it an orgy of gambling may be factually correct, but this would be at odds with the feel-good wholesomeness and sense of national unity that the Grand National so clearly generates. Damn, it makes you glad to pay the (mandatory) £120.96-a-year BBC license fee.



I was reminded of this when I had a chat with a BBC radio researcher for a feature she was doing about online poker. After lapping up my thrilling tales of green-baize daring do, she concluded our chat by rather stiffly explaining that if we were going to talk about poker, we would – of course – have to counterpoint anything I said with the views of an expert from the anti-gambling lobby.



I respect this, and have come to expect it in dealings with the media. We should always advocate responsible gambling in poker, because we all know too well that every poker career begins with failure, so it is right and proper that anyone considering making an online deposit does so with his or her eyes open. But I couldn't resist asking this particular researcher why precisely she felt the need to put a negative spin on a few hands of poker between friends.



"Well, you know … it's gambling … and this is the BBC," she explained.



"But I thought the BBC loved a punt!" I said. "After all, what media organization does more to promote gambling in the UK?"



This rather stumped her, but let me explain. The Grand National is essentially a betting event, the biggest day of the year as far as British bookies are concerned. Some will claim that the race is a sporting contest and that betting is not the point. But this year a jaw-dropping 66 percent of viewers – that is 6.27 million people – watched the race with their own money riding on the outcome (figures helpfully supplied by the BBC's own horse-racing website). And the Grand National, big as it may be, is just one day in the BBC's racing diary, which also includes TV coverage of Royal Ascot, The Epsom Derby, and Glorious Goodwood, and radio commentary of the Cheltenham festival, among others. Altogether, we are talking 70 hours of TV racing per year, and within each broadcast, the BBC is always very careful to mention race sponsors such as Paddy Power, Ladbrokes, William Hill, and so on. The roles are clear: The BBC spins the wheel, while our established high-street bookies take your bets.



Football is the only sport to get more coverage than racing on the BBC, and a lot of the footy chat nowadays is increasingly couched in the language of bookmakers: "Wigan Athletic pushing for a place in Europe … what were the odds on that at the beginning of the season?" The same also goes for political coverage in the UK, which is one of the fastest growing sectors of the gambling market. The decision on whether to back the prime minister or Sven Goran Eriksson to be out of office by the end of summer 2006 (Blair is currently 9-5 on) provoked a long and detailed discussion on BBC Radio Five Live, with expert contribution from bookmaker Derek McGovern, its own in-house betting expert. The BBC is such a reliable sports forum for betting of all kinds that I swear Betfair would be lost without it.



Even Radio 4's Today news program, the very essence of UK establishment broadcasting, offers a racing Tip for the Day every morning with your morning toast and tea. I don't recall ever hearing this part of the program interrupted by a spokesman from Gamblers Anonymous, or the Salford University Centre of Gambling Disorders.



Then there is the National Lottery, which Victoria Coren described as having successfully "turned gambling into acceptable family fun" (The Observer). When the Lottery was launched in 1994, there was a tug of war between ITV and the BBC for the rights to broadcast the live draw on Wednesday and Saturday nights. The people who run the lottery are no dummies, and they opted for the national broadcaster over the commercial stations, confident that they had found the best possible prime-time shop window for the punters – sorry, viewers. I totally appreciate that the National Lottery is a valuable fundraising organization, but I did notice that lottery operators Camelot PLC made a £47 million profit last year.



I am among those who think that it is perfectly decent and respectable for the family to gather each year to watch the Grand National and bet on the gee-gees, and it is clear that most Britons feel the same way. So, I point out these facts about the BBC not as a criticism, but as a clarification. Maybe the next time someone explains that "this is the BBC," she will have a more accurate understanding of the role played by the UK's national broadcaster.

Conrad Brunner works for PokerStars.com.