'It was a perfect storm' - ITV Racing's Christmas Festival hailed a huge success

ITV Racing's new Christmas Festival was given a big thumbs up by bookmakers on Monday having proved a festive hit with punters.

From December 26 to New Year's Day, ITV broadcast more than 18 hours of racing coverage on either its main channel or sister station ITV4, including 41 races hosted by 12 courses from Britain and Ireland.

December 30 was the only day over the week-long period, branded the ITV Racing Christmas Festival for the first time, when there was no free-to-air coverage of the sport, and the reaction from punters could not have been more positive according to Ladbrokes Coral PR director Simon Clare.

"The way ITV covered the Christmas period has been exceptional," said Clare. "The immediate benefit of ITV cameras on any horserace is to see a doubling to trebling of turnover, but a lot of stars aligned last week.

"The betting turnover from Boxing Day right the way through to Monday's bank holiday is probably the most important period to racing outside of the Cheltenham Festival.

"You had the perfect storm of all the racing being on and some brilliant coverage. Also, the bonus of having a period when racing was off just before Christmas is that it then fuels very competitive racing. The fields have been unbelievable."

Clare added: "Calling it the ITV Racing Christmas Festival gives ITV a narrative which it can talk about. If that sticks in the ITV consumer's mind that they have to come back every day to watch ITV Racing, then brilliant. They're thinking of ways to package it up and attract more viewers."

To avoid a clash with the Boxing Day football fixtures, the King George at Kempton was brought forward to 2.30pm last week, another move Clare supported.

He added: "It was only a shift of half an hour or so but it was a good move. The fact it was a competitive field with no odds-on favourite, as well as being well timed and with great coverage, meant it was a bumper betting race.

Bravemansgame and Harry Cobden blaze to glory in the King GeorgeCredit: Alan Crowhurst

"We'll have to do some analysis of the whole period but I'm sure it will be well up year-on-year and probably as good a period as we've had in recent years. It would be quite fun to try and plug that [one-day] gap in the future and have a magnificent seven days."

ITV will broadcast around 120 days of racing in 2023, having grown from 95 days when taking over the terrestrial rights to British racing in 2017, and Clare thinks the channel's ongoing commitment to the sport is something racing should be proud of.

"We're very lucky to have such a proactive and passionate broadcaster," he said. "Racing should be proud that ITV wants to cover more and more racing. It's a sign of confidence in the sport."

Paul Binfield, spokesman for Paddy Power, shared Clare's enthusiasm for ITV's coverage and reported some positive results from the bookmaker's trading floor over Christmas.

"Year-on-year both stakes and uniques [individual bets] were up through the week," said Binfield. "It's not the easiest thing to compare but overall the inaugural ITV Racing Christmas Festival seems to have been a great success. Ed Chamberlin and his team covered it brilliantly and it was a fantastic shop window for the sport."

Constitution Hill: another star of the Christmas periodCredit: Getty Images

A peak audience of 725,000 tuned into ITV for the King George on December 26, with an average audience of 485,000 and a 6.7 per cent share of the Boxing Day viewership watching the action from Kempton and Wetherby.

While those headline figures were down on last year, where the audience peaked at 1.1 million, they were similar to the pre-Covid pandemic figures of 2019, when the peak audience was 781,000 and the average 561,000.

It was a similar story on December 27, when the average audience for ITV's coverage from Kempton and Chepstow was 363,000 compared to 496,000 in 2021 and 401,000 in 2019, but the channel's share of the audience was only narrowly down from the previous year and slightly up on 2019.

With Saturday's Challow Hurdle day at Newbury falling on New Year's Eve and the New Year's Day coverage from Cheltenham, Musselburgh and Tramore coming on a Sunday, the expanded ITV Christmas coverage had a very different composition to previous years, but a spokesperson for the channel said the team were delighted with the positive reaction to the festival and to have broadcast to a "huge number of people" over the week.

Read more:

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Christmas Hurdle: 'Amazing Constitution Hill continues unstoppable march towards Champion Hurdle

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