Living Lester is given a rough ride

If you happen to be a Christian Scientist who grew up reading the adventures of Noddy and Big Ears, spent your summers in Butlin's holiday camps and went on to make your fortune backing Lester Piggottridden horses, you've probably had your fill of Channel Four's Secret Lives series by now.

In the past year, L Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, Enid Blyton and Billy Butlin have been just some of the subjects of Secret Lives investigations, and each was shown to be a less than wholesome individual. Most shocking of all was the revelation that the married Blyton had had a lengthy affair with an equally married surgeon, a disclosure that rocked Toytown to its foundations - and almost caused Big Ears to crash his little yellow car into Noddy's taxi.

The big advantage, however, that Blyton, Hubbard and Butlin held over Piggott, as their Secret Lives programmes hit our screens, was that they were all dead at the time. Lester was very much alive when his one-hour special was aired last Wednesday night.

The Channel Four trailer for the programme promised to reveal "a darker side" to Lester. A darker side? Was he a member of a scummy, Nazi Keep Britain White organisation? Did he run footballmaking sweat-shops in southern Asia where child labour was used? Or did he once buy a Charlie Landsborough album? No, none of these. What the programme turned out to be was a This Is Your Life from hell, made up of an hour's bitching by former acquaintances of Lester, including Robert Sangster, Willie Carson and his former chauffeur, who clearly didn't like him a whole lot - or had a few old scores to settle.

What we "learnt" was that Lester wanted to win "at all costs", was a "womaniser" and was so mean he'd even nick knives and forks off planes. And Channel Four used up a whole hour of their air-time to tell us this? When Lester was contacted by ITV teletext's TV Focus for a comment on the programme, he said: "It's bo****ks". And how right he was.

"His reputation was such that no delightful young female was safe," revealed ex-Lloyds underwriter Ian Postgate. "It was all fair game, and all the stable women were open season."

"His wife Susan is a very nice grown-up lady and I think she knew what he was like from an early stage," added Charles Benson, former racing correspondent with the Daily Express. "They'd married young and she knew his games." And this was investigative journalism at the cutting edge?

Amusingly, Benson revealed the lengths he went to to persuade the editors of Fleet Street not to publish the story that led to Piggott being charged with tax evasion. But he had no qualms about revealing to Secret Lives details about Piggott's private life which, surely, are nobody's business but his own, and his wife's. If he were a Tory politician preaching family values, then fine, he's fair game. But the man was a jockey, for God's sake.

The only "revelation" which merited discussion (and long since known by followers of horse-racing) was Piggott's "appalling disciplinary record" and "reckless riding" which, on one occasion, caused a trainee jockey to crash into rails in a race, resulting in his horse breaking his back.

Other than that it was tabloid tack. "Lester has a complete disregard for any authority or any boundaries, his home life, the revenue, stewards or riding - I mean, he rode to win," said Robert Sangster, in an accusing tone. "That was the essential quality that we loved," he hastily added, as he remembered that he had actually hired this horrible man to ride a number of his horses to Classic victories. "He is very bizarre, but there you are," concluded Willie Carson. Not half as bizarre as the people who thought this programme was worth making.

Monday night's Panorama, which investigated how football has become the "money game" in England, was a much more worthy production, even if there wasn't anything particularly new in reports of club directors making financial killings out of the game. The programme made depressing viewing all the same. An average rise of 144 per cent in ticket prices at grounds around England in the last six years has led to the growth of "football's new underclass".

At Newcastle's St James's Park, we saw supporters, for whom the team is their life, hanging around the gate at the corner of the stadium trying to catch a glimpse of the action inside, because they can no longer afford to get into the ground anymore. Season tickets cost £300, the price of admission in to one game is around £22 - and even if you have the money the tickets are hard to come by.

Then we heard about the plight of the Manchester Schools FA, which has supplied stars such as Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes to Manchester United. When the club signed Butt they made a donation of "around £100" to the association. This year United made a pre-tax profit of £27.6 million; meanwhile, Manchester Schools FA is about to go bust, mainly because of the cost of transporting their teams to matches. "If someone gave us a minibus it would save us thousands of pounds a year," said Des Murphy, a man who has devoted most of his life to nurturing players like Butt. "United wouldn't even notice it on their bank balance," he said. But still they wait for their minibus. By the time Butt and Scholes play in next summer's World Cup finals, Manchester Schools FA will probably have gone out of existence. Funny old game.

Lennie Milne is Ulster hockey's equivalent of Des Murphy. Last Tuesday night Milne, who has coached junior hockey at Annadale for the past 10 years, won the BBC Northern Ireland Spirit of Sport Award. Despite battling against cancer for the past year, he continued training the junior team, never missing a session, and now he's back playing the game.

"If you feel free to talk about this, could you tell us about the illness and how you overcame it," asked presenter Suzanne Dando when Milne collected his award on stage. What's the saying? Be careful what you ask for, you might get it?

"Well, I was diagnosed in May as having bowel cancer so I've had parts of my rectum removed, I've had my bowel turned inside out to have a colostomy and I've had my backside put up in to my stomach," explained Milne. Dando turned green.

"This is actually the best bit," he added. "There's been all this talk about bottoms and things, like that there, so I think, to be perfectly honest, 1997 has been a bit of an anus horribulus for me," he said, grinning.