'There is extraordinary beauty in every episode' - Horsepower documentary comes to the BBC

Just days after dropping racing tips from its flagship Radio 4 Today programme, the BBC had better news for the sport when it revealed it is to show the Horsepower documentary series.

All four episodes will be on BBC iPlayer from next Tuesday, with the first two broadcast that evening on BBC4 and the last two shown on the same channel a week later.

The series was filmed from autumn 2020 through to the summer of 2021 and originally shown on Amazon Prime. It captured nine months in the lives of trainer Andrew Balding and jockey Oisin Murphy, who was facing the prospect of a lengthy ban at the time after a positive test for cocaine.

Balding's sister Clare, a leading broadcaster, said: "Horsepower offers a great insight into how hard my brother has worked to turn Kingsclere into a training operation that can compete with the biggest and the best.

"I'm so proud of Andrew, his wife Anna Lisa and the team they have built around them and I found this series incredibly revealing — there's stuff in here that I never knew and have never seen so I can safely say that it's intriguing and the camera work is sensational."

Journalist and author Paul Hayward, a former Racing Post writer, added: “I became hooked on Horsepower and watched them pretty much back-to-back.

"What they do, I feel, is capture the magic and spirit of racing for a non-specialist audience, which is surely the point, with some extraordinary human and equine stories woven in.

"It made me love racing even more and caused me to consider elements of the sport I had lost sight of. There is extraordinary beauty in every episode.”

It was produced by Equine Productions and Lorton Entertainment, whose chief operating officer Ed Barratt said: “Our partners, Equine Productions, deserve huge praise for producing this exceptional documentary.

"The enthralling mix of human-interest stories and stunning footage have rightly made for an acclaimed four-part series."

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