I Watch TV: The Racing Game

 

The Racing Game

Dick Francis, champion jockey and thriller writer created a character Sid Halley in his novel Odds Against. Halley is injured in a racing accident and has to retire; depressed he mopes around until his ex-wife’s father Charles Roland comes to him with a problem. An Australian investor and his wife are making attempts to buy out the race course (Roland is the chairman) to build a supermarket. They might succeed as a variety of strange accidents occur on the course. Inviting Halley to stay for the weekend along with the investor, Roland makes a big deal of Halley’s working class roots, his injury, and how he doesn’t work. This is intended to mislead the investor, and also spur Halley to action. As it turns out the investor and wife are pretty sadistic, enjoying bullying Halley and insisting on seeing his hand. Later as the plot develops they capture Halley, and threaten him. Their racecourse henchman tells them pain won’t work, jump jockeys eat that for breakfast, but they think they know a weakness – his injured hand (which he’s ashamed of).

This was turned into the first episode of this TV series, cutting down a lot of the plot and rather unfortunately reducing the role of the investor’s wife who in the novel is quite dark, feeling an almost sexual thrill at causing pain and embarrassment, or so I remember, it’s been more than 20 years since I read it*. That said it’s not as though this series cuts down on the violence. The opening credits of every episode has Halley, played by Mike Gwilym, fall in a race, a hoof comes down on a hand, and he acts incredible pain.

Following the events of the first episode Halley teams up with his judo-expert friend Chico Barnes as private detectives, using Halley’s racing contacts and Chico’s detective and judo skills – Chico and Halley developing a fighting technique for Halley that uses his artificial arm. As there’s at least one attempt to beat him up in every episode – seems the horse racing world is quite rough – this gets used quite a lot. If Chico is slightly more likely to be distracted by women or drink, there’s not that much to choose between them for that.

They made six episodes, investigating horse-napping, fixed races, some complicated registration fraud, insurance fraud, blackmail and more. As I said it gets violent, sometimes fatally so. They occasionally have to stop and explain some esoteric bit of horse racing lore, and perhaps most of interest is the late 1970s society they move through. There’s some very old-fashioned horse people, combined with up to date technology. There’s a couple of clever reveals, and plenty of filming at race meetings, though more in bars and stables.

Watch This: Crime thriller series with some interesting settings and characters (and horses)
Don’t Watch This: Violent, ridiculous, dated

* Bringing the new Dick Francis in paperback on holiday was something my parents did every year when I was growing up.