It’s both surprising and amusing for me for me to be back at ITV after all this time. But not as amused as the response of the first guy I told on Saturday. “Crikey,” he said, “so they are bringing back the living dead.”

OK it will be 16 years since I ended my long stint fronting Channel 4 Racing and 44 since I first started with ITV but I have never been far away and my role will be the very different one of adding a bit of perspective on the big days in the calendar.  In doing that, the years away will have been a help not a hindrance.

The media world is much changed since I started out in 1972 and the challenge for ITV Racing is much greater than back then when live football coverage was confined to the Cup Final and Internationals and Sky Sports was just another idea roaming round the head of Rupert Murdoch. But racing has given me enormous fun down the years and if I can help getting some of that over to a wider audience it will be time well spent.