Forget the Boat Race, come for the dining experience

The Chanel J12 Boat Race is almost upon us, and here’s a quick clarification for anyone who got confused by last week’s news stories and now thinks Chanel J12 is where you will need to tune to follow the Thameside action this year.

In fact, it’s Channel 4 you’re going to want for pictures, while, as newly revealed, the radio rights have been bought by something called “Times Radio”, which, so far as I can ­ascertain, is a kind of pirate station being operated by bravely enthusiastic amateur radio hams off an ­unregistered boat moored somewhere in the North Sea.

The radio development is remarkable from a number of directions, but principally because it means that this will be the first time in almost a century that the BBC, the national broadcaster, hasn’t had any kind of wellies on the ground at this ­venerable sporting match-up/proxy college reunion (depending on your point of view).

Some further clarification, though: not only is Chanel J12 not a broadcaster, it isn’t a perfume either, which, I confess, was my first assumption. No, it turns out it’s a collection of fine Swiss watches from the great French fashion house, starting at £6,600 and heading rapidly upwards from there in the direction of oil prices. The J12 Baguette Diamond Bezel 38mm ­version, for example, retails at £124,000, which was coincidentally, as of July 2025, almost the average cost of a house in Blackpool. In fairness, though, you don’t have to pay £1,675 annual council tax on a Swiss watch, so that’s a saving.

Moreover, just last week the Boat Race’s organisers proudly declared Fortnum & Mason their “Official Luxury Dining Partner” and announced that the storied Piccadilly department store will be in charge of “dining experiences” aboard the ­flotilla of “VIP launches” that will trail the competing boats. (Some clarification again: distinct from a “meal” or “catering”, a “dining experience” is food that you’ve knowingly and quite deliberately overpaid for.)

Obviously it would be hard to fault the Boat Race/Fortnum synergy in demographic terms, although a quick browse just then of the F&M hamper department’s online offering suggests that those launch-bound race-goers nex month had better be more than averagely ­partial to English cherry preserve, lemon and oregano mayonnaise and tins of rose-scented Turkish delight. And good luck with all of that if the water gets choppy.

All this poshness, though. Small wonder the BBC seems to have decided that the Boat Race is now as close to polo as makes no difference and has lost interest. Ah well. At least Times Radio will be around to provide the common touch. No doubt there will be some expressing dismay that an event which once genuinely held the nation in thrall should now be scrapping for audience on such an obscure platform. Where next? The hospital radio outlet at St Helier in Carshalton?

Yet, on reflection I reckon that’s a very smart PR move by the race’s organisers, and perhaps even the beginning of some kind of rebrand, which the Boat Race is going to need if it isn’t going to carry on down its current dwindling path. For this, indisputably, is positive discrimination in action. It’s certainly just that little bit harder to make accusations of elitism stick about an event that’s opened its admissions policy wide enough to let in Times Radio.

As for Channel 4, though… well, it’s a little harder to work out what it is doing in these parts. Once, the Boat Race would have been precisely the kind of hidebound institution for which Channel 4 would have been interested in supplying an alternative, as it has historically done with the reigning monarch’s message on Christmas Day: a parallel rubber duck race martialled by Noel Fielding, say, or an actual boat race, with actual boats, on the actual Thames, but (just to make a point of contrast) exclusively crewed by students from Durham and Bristol who failed Oxbridge entrance and have nursed unresolved feelings about the system ever since.

It’s for that kind of thing, surely, that Channel 4 exists. Or, as we’ll be referring to it on the day, Chanel No 4, because clearly things round here are changing fast.

Photography by Jeremy Fletcher/Redferns