Pointless: how much - or how little - does the general public know about racing?

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This is a Pointless column, the first I've written – possibly. It was prompted by an episode of the BBC's long-running quiz show turning up on YouTube the other day which ended with the winning couple trying to recall racehorse names.

I've always loved it when racing pops up in unexpected places of the TV universe and I'm sure you're the same. I remember a Miss Marple episode where, in a bid for authenticity, they showed a footman reading the results in the paper and I tried to figure out if they were from real 1950s races. 

Also back in the 1980s, there was a memory man who was tested on his recall of what happened to 40 Grand National runners drawn from ten races; I think he had to get them all right within a minute. What show would that have been? ITV on a Saturday around teatime, I think. And wasn't there a picture of Lester on Nijinsky on the wall of a bail bondsman in Jackie Brown?

Racing has come up a few times on Pointless and I'm starting to suspect that its uber-smooth (but somehow still raffish) presenter Alexander Armstrong has half an interest in the great game. It's always interesting for the insight it offers into how much or how little knowledge about our sport is absorbed by the general public.

In case you don't know, the researchers for Pointless spend their lives asking 100 people to name as many answers to a particular question as they can inside 100 seconds. Then the contestants have to come up with an answer that none of those people mentioned.

And so to the climax of this episode I was watching, when a father-daughter team were chasing a jackpot of £3,250. To get it, all they had to do was name any horse since 1980 who had won the Scottish, Welsh or Irish Grand Nationals ... provided said horse had not already been named by the Pointless hundred.

Terribly over-excited, I came up with Androma, Stearsby and Perris Valley in about five seconds and waited, agog, for Richard Osman to confirm that my three were among the few that were pointless. But only a bit more reflection told me that, in any random sample of 100 members of the public, they'd be pretty lucky to find anyone who could name a single winner of those races off the top of their heads.

Laurence, the dad contestant, was equal to the task, however. In the minute's reflection allowed him, he almost immediately named Carvill's Hill, then Desert Orchid. "I've heard of that one," said daughter Louise. Moments later, he dredged Cool Ground from somewhere and that was the answer that landed them the lolly.

Carvill's Hill was a while ago but he was also the most memorable Welsh National winner of my lifetime and his fame increased with the controversial Gold Cup that followed. If any Welsh National winner was going to score points in this game, you'd think it would be him, but he was also a pointless answer.

Desert Orchid wasn't pointless, may the Lord be thanked for small mercies, but he only scored three. Don't confuse that with a recognition rate; it's three people out of 100 who specifically knew that Dessie won the Irish National. Had they been asked to name popular grey steeplechasers, more people would have named him, I trust. Still, a score of three is not much of anything.

Three people were able to name Desert Orchid as an Irish Grand National winner

"The big scorers there were Our Duke, Desert Orchid, General Principle and Thunder And Roses," Osman added, though he didn't offer any more scores, an unusual lack of thoroughness from him. Apart from Dessie, those would have been three of the four most recent winners at the time of filming.

Likewise, Native River was said to be "the biggest scorer" for the Welsh race and Vicente for the Scottish. I was left wondering if in fact they might have been the only scorers and if their scores hadn't been mentioned because they were embarrassingly low.

There are two ways of looking at this. A random sample of 100 people can apparently name four winners of the Irish National, which isn't bad. If you gave me 100 seconds to name winners of that race, I'm not sure the words "General Principle" would come out of my mouth, even though it was only five years ago.

But for this same show, the researchers asked their 100 to name the Belgian cyclist who won the Tour de France five times from 1969 and a whopping 28 came up with the correct answer, Eddy Merckx. How on Earth did all those sports fans miss Carvill's Hill more than 20 years later?

Back in 2013, the National itself was the subject for the Pointless jackpot round, when a cheery young couple, Bex and Greg, had to name either a winning horse with a one-word name, a winning trainer or a jockey who had won it twice. Ballabriggs scored four, Papillon scored one and then they (very impressively) hit a pointless answer with Numbersixvalverde, scooping £9,500.

Amazingly enough, Willie Mullins was a pointless answer in the trainer category. You'd like to think that would no longer be true, because of his extraordinary success in recent years, though his only National win is now 18 years old.

Martin Pipe was also a pointless answer. Fred Winter was pointless in both the trainer and jockey category.

It's not good enough, is it, really? These are all legends of the game and we should be spreading their fame at every opportunity. Let's all go and tell someone now about what Carvill's Hill looked like that day in Wales.

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The Front Runner is our unmissable email newsletter available exclusively to Members' Club Ultimate subscribers. Chris Cook, a four-time Racing Reporter of the Year award winner, provides his take on the day's biggest stories and tips for the upcoming racing every morning from Monday to Friday. Not a Members' Club Ultimate subscriber? Click here to join today and also receive our Ultimate Daily emails plus our full range of fantastic website and newspaper content.