Inside ITV Racing: how Ed Chamberlin, Ruby Walsh and those behind the scenes will bring Cheltenham into our homes

As tradition dictates, the Cheltenham Festival will start with the Supreme Novices' Hurdle roar next Tuesday. For ITV Racing, the festival will actually begin 35 minutes before that, not with a roar but what is known in television land as an opener.

Much like a Cheltenham runner, the opener and all that follows have been months in the planning. ITV's initial preparations for the 2025 festival commenced almost as soon as the credits finished rolling on last year's Gold Cup programme. Serious thoughts on what viewers will see over the four days, not least at the beginning of day one, kicked off in early autumn. 

Openers can be wonderfully theatrical or fantastically simple. At the top of a Royal Ascot programme two years ago, viewers saw Ed Chamberlin and Jason Weaver jumping out of a plane and then executing a parachute landing. Chamberlin's broadcasting hero Des Lynam opted to keep his parachute at home when famously welcoming BBC viewers to England's 1998 World Cup afternoon match against Tunisia with the words: "Shouldn't you be at work?"