Life

Even reality TV can be good - sometimes

Billy Foley

Billy Foley

Billy has almost 30 years’ experience in journalism after leaving DCU with a BAJ. He has worked at the Irish Independent, Evening Herald and Sunday Independent in Dublin, the Cork-based Evening Echo and the New Zealand Herald. He joined the Irish News in 2000, working as a reporter and then Deputy News Editor. He has been News Editor since 2007

Matt Allwright presents the new series of Housing Enforcers
Matt Allwright presents the new series of Housing Enforcers Matt Allwright presents the new series of Housing Enforcers

The Long Shot, RTE 1, Tuesday at 9.35pm

I’ve rather had my fill of reality TV and was all ready to pan this programme, but then, God dammit, it turned out to be interesting.

The Long Shot is the story of a council estate boy who had a huge win as a first time horse race owner and then tried to replicate it.

He walked away with around one million euros after selling Royal Ascot winner ‘Lolly for Dolly’ in 2011 and was now reinvesting half of it, spending E400,000 on six new horses and about E100,000 on two year’s stable fees.

He was taking a punt in a “billionaire’s game,” the narrator told us.

By the end of two years, David Keoghan, a former 400m hurdler for Ireland, had sold all the horses and lost around E30,000.

He was chastened but determined to carry on, though perhaps with one horse at a time.

It was a fascinating tale of the brutality of life inside one of Ireland’s biggest sports.

Keoghan, who is married to Bertie Ahern’s daughter Cecilia, stabled his horses with Fozzy Stack, at Thomastown Castle Stud.

Fozzy was exactly what you’d expect of a horsey man – baseball cap, smoking and driving a battered jeep alongside the gallop.

The few words he did speak tended to fairly blunt questions to jockeys about the performance of his mount.

Keoghan’s role was to provide the funds and to travel to rural Irish racetracks hoping that Fozzy had developed a champion.

Clancy Avenue, named after the family home in Finglas, looked the part for a while but fell away when he stepped up to Class 2 races. Nonetheless, he was sold to a Hong Kong owner for almost E200,000.

Long Shot had plenty on the back story of Keoghan, who grew up in Finglas to a taxi driver father; the family left for England in his early teens and he had a successful amateur running career before returning to Ireland.

Some of the main questions were left unexplained, however. Where did Keoghan get the initial stake money? And did it come from Cecilia, a successful chick-lit author?

There was certainly a hint that it did.

When Keoghan visited his granny to assure us of his solid working class background, he reminded her how his granddad had joked that Cecilia was “Lolly Dolly” every time she got another book or movie advance.

That aside, the Long Shot was an enjoyable hour on one of Ireland’s strongest sports.

***

The Housing Enforcers, BBC 1, Monday

Matt Allwright, who has made a career out of inspecting dodgy building work, is back for a new series.

This time he’s training as an housing enforcer with a council. It was the first of 20 episodes so it’s going to be lot of study time for Allwright.

The premise is that the price of houses in Britain means more people than ever before are renting and councils are having to work harder to protect them from rogue landlords.

Essentially it’s daytime TV which has leaked into the prime time and doesn’t have the gloss of Location, Location, Location.

It’s closer to Cowboy Builders, but in its own way tells the stories of people who are suffering at the hands of the unscrupulous.