Ellison in bullish mood as he takes Red route to the Cheltenham Festival

Brian Ellison can do deadpan pretty well, along with forthright and the pithy one-liner. Maybe it's the working-class Geordie in him. If you want to hear him laugh, though, that's not a problem either. Just ask.

"So, Brian, would you have ridden anything as good as Definitly Red in the course of your 20 years as a jump jockey?" That should do it.

The laugh is stifled, somewhere between a head-shaking chuckle of disbelief and a snort of derision, but it's definitely a laugh. Words are almost superfluous: the stocky 65-year-old gamely throws in a nod to Tex, the beast on whom he once beat the mighty Tingle Creek at Worcester some four decades past, but the list of riding highlights is short and not especially sweet.