I’ve been watching it just now and I must say I think a lot of the criticisms seem a bit harsh. I thought it wasn’t too bad, but then maybe my expectations were lowered considerably reading these comments!

I’ll concede cinematically I don’t know what I’m talking about at all but it didn’t seem too bad for the most part. There were some glaring exceptions though!

The pre-amble was good; informative without being patronising. The mix of classes wasn’t confusing to me but kept me interested - I tended to skip forward through the lower classes until the main field appeared again on the old youtube footage. And as for the ‘fancam’ footage, ‘t’was ever thus; who else remembers Steve Rider’s commentary over the the fan submitted footage of Mark Lovell’s crash on the Twiglees stage of the ‘86 Scottish?

Hollie McRae was surprisingly good as a service park reporter, I think I assumed there would be an overuse of sporting TV buzzwords and cliches, but there was none of that - I don’t think I even heard the word ‘iconic’ once. And service park interviews are to me what classic rally roundup shows are supposed to have, none of this ram a microphone in every driver’s face at he end of every single stage and force them to come up with something interesting and original each time…

Better stage-side shots for the Severn Valley Rally will hopefully make this properly polished and miles better than it was last time the BRC was on TV - was it back in ‘18 on Channel 4 at 7:30am on a Saturday with some berk who didn’t have the first clue about rallying?