Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A racehorse trainer and lynchpin of British flat racing, he has more British winners than any trainer in history.
On the island
Eight records
I decided that I should have a group that I followed and that I was a fan of, and I chose Slade. And that has remained to this day. The song we're going to hear, Get Down and Get With It, not actually a Slade song, but a song they covered. And it's the ringtone on my phone, so I thought quite appropriate.
Paolo Nuttini, although he's of Italian descent, in his music he sums up Glasgow culture, and particularly this song Pencil Full of Lead.
I grew up very much, spent an awful lot of time with my cousin David. I was at university, he was running a restaurant in Aberfoyle, and David would tape these songs from the radio, and he'd have homemade cassette tapes in his car, and one of them would always start with this Mill Age Old, You May Be Right, and it brings back great memories of those days.
Deirdre and I had quite a tumultuous relationship. It started when she was 14 and I was 17 and she went off to college and a lot of people I suppose would have said that it wouldn't last and this song sort of sums that up. You're Still the One Shania Twain, sung here not by Shania but by our youngest son Angus with Deirdre backing him up.
This comes from that, as you say, I described it as a tumultuous relationship with Deirdre while she was at college and I was at university. I think I put this on a cassette tape and sent it to her. I think there's a line in it about not realising it's only the time that was wrong. And I think I was right there, that eventually the time was right and we got back together.
I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)
I knew the bride, Dave Edmonds, could listen to these lyrics day in, day out, on a desert island perhaps.
I get hate mail on occasions, emails, text messages, usually when favourites get beaten and some of them can be quite nasty. And the Dixie Chicks in whatever year it was, the Second Iraq War, the lead singer made a statement, I think somewhere in Britain, at a concert and she said, not everybody from Texas supports the war, we are from Texas and we don't support the war. And they had death threats and it brings everything that happens to us into perspective a bit and this song Not Ready to Make Nice was a bit of a comeback track for them and it just makes me realize that there's people a lot worse off than me in that sense.
Don't StopFavourite
I had to have a Fleetwood Mic record. Rumours is one of the greatest albums, if not the greatest album ever, and I think Don't Stop is probably the best track.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:13What's the mood like in the yard today [after racing returned from lockdown]?
The mood's great, yeah. It's uh it's fantastic to be back. It's been a a long time of sort of ticking over and training horses with uh no target in mind, so we're all delighted to be back doing it.
Presenter asks
3:02How important is it for you to be such a significant part of this long history of horse racing?
I suppose I never imagined that I would be part of it or a big part of it. I didn't come from a racing background. I didn't really know how to get into racing. It was unthinkable for me as a teenager to think that I would brush shoulders with the likes of Sir Michael Stout. I couldn't simply imagine socialising with him or staying in his house, or Joe Mercer, who was the champion jockey at the time, staying in my house. Although I was determined and I believed that I could get to the top, I don't know if I really thought it would happen.
Presenter asks
7:19Tell me a little bit more about [your front running style] and the thinking behind that approach.
I can honestly say in those four thousand four hundred or five hundred winners that we've had, I have never instructed a jockey to lead the field. You can't dictate where you should sit in the field because you don't know how fast the others are going to be going. The most efficient way to cover the distance in the fastest time is to do it at as near as possible to a constant speed without any extremes of acceleration or braking. For the vast majority of horses, I say just bowl along where it's happy.
The keepsakes
The book
Alexandre Dumas
because there's so many changes of character and so many characters in it, that I think I could read it time and time again and get something new out of it each time.
The luxury
there's so many uses for a good pair of binoculars that I think I get hours of pleasure out of them on the island and I can look for boats going past as well.
Presenter asks
16:47Where do you think the chutzpah to go for this long-held dream [of becoming a racehorse trainer] came from, especially when you got quite a steady job going there and a job that you'd work very hard to get?
In a period of three and a half years I had three jobs, but each one of them was just trying to get me closer to a foot in the door with racing stables.
Presenter asks
27:25There are those people who believe that horse training and horse racing is not ethically sound. What do you say to their concerns? How do you answer them?
Quite simply, it's the same as the debate over meat production and so on. I have a very realist well I believe it's a very realistic view to animal welfare that if people didn't race racehorses, the animals wouldn't exist. That normal for the thoroughbred horse is a stable and three or four square meals a day. That's what they've been bred for, that's when they're happiest, that's when their welfare is controlled, and that's very important to me.
Presenter asks
29:59What's your management style at work? How would you describe that?
I don't think it's my forty. I wanted to train horses, not people. We had a very successful apprentice jockey, Keith Douglish, who's now a very successful trainer. He rode Shamerdahl, a great horse I trained, and he rode him in his last gallop before his first start. Keith said to me, the only question about this horse is where would you like it to win? Because it will win anywhere. That was really unusual because Keith never said much after a gallop. And then I heard recently that Keith said, totally unconnected with that story, he said about me that I never listened to a word he said. He would just be about to open his mouth and I'd be walking off in the other direction. So I'm quite guilty of not maybe giving people as much time as I should.
“it's a Scottish trait that we're driven more by the fear of failure than the the goal of success”
“The fact that I'm not sentimental about them doesn't mean I don't care about them.”
“I have never instructed a jockey to lead the field.”
“if people didn't race racehorses, the animals wouldn't exist.”
“I wanted to train horses, not people.”