Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Craig Braddick, a horse racing commentator based in the US where he has been living since 2001. Originally from Cambridge, England, Craig works mainly at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, Arizona, where the new film Jockey (Clint Bentley, 2021) was filmed. We find out why Craig made the journey and about how he has worked in around 18 different states largely doing media work. Race calling is a specialized field and we hear about his passion for that. His father was a professional pundit and Craig has been around horseracing since a young age. He talks about how he overcame a speech impediment by emulating TV commentators as a boy. We learn that Peter O’Sullevan and other commentators were very encouraging, and we reflect on the skills that previous generations of broadcasters had. As a commentator the job is to tell a story, like a novel – there are protagonists and antagonists – and Craig explains that although you can see more through binoculars than you can on a TV screen you have to k