How ITV Racing roared back to life from a Crouch End bedroom
Lee Mottershead watches Paul McNamara direct a most unusual programme
On June's first Friday in 2019 ITV Racing director Paul McNamara was diagnosed with bowel cancer.
On June's first Friday in 2020 he is sat in one of the bedrooms of his family's north London home in Crouch End, readying himself to steer the troops through a live television experience that could be testing even for such a master of the craft.
In front of him are two pairs of spectacles, a keyboard, any number of switches and a huge monitor on which individual screens are showing pictures from Newmarket, Lingfield and four members of the ITV Racing talent team, most of them working from home. McNamara is wearing carpet slippers. Ed Chamberlin and Francesca Cumani may be as well but we never get sufficiently close to their feet to find out.
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