All the information you need to make sure you can watch the most famous race of them all this April. Copy link. twitter. facebook. whatsapp. The Grand National remains one of the few truly unifying sport events in the UK sporting calendar, with millions glued to television screens every year in early April. The entries for this year’s race on April 5 are already in ahead of the unveiling of the handicap weights on February 11.
Here, Telegraph Sport gives you all the information you need about how to make sure you can watch the most famous jumps race of them all. The Grand National will be shown live on free-to-air television by ITV as the show-piece in the channel’s truncated coverage of the three-day meeting at Aintree. For full, uninterrupted coverage of the Grand National meeting – including the big race itself – you need to sign up for a subscription for Racing TV, which owns the rights to showing all racing from Aintree.
Racing TV costs £29.98 monthly or you can pay an up-front fee of £298 for an annual membership. You can also pay £10 for a day pass. Be sure to check the Racing TV website in the weeks before the meeting for promotional offers. Both ITV and Racing TV have streaming services as part of their offering. ITVX can be accessed either via the website or by downloading the app directly to your phone. The same is true of Racing TV, which has a dedicated app as well as streaming via web browser.
Last year, a peak of 6.1 million people tuned in to watch the Grand National, a fall of 1.4 million from the figure in 2023. Blame for that drop has been blamed on the moving of the race’s start time forward from 5.45pm to 4pm, when less people are watching television. The race still accounted for 60 per cent of the people watching at the time, continuing a year-on-year increase. ITV’s main presenter Ed Chamberlain said: “That figure is pretty much what we were expecting.
“Having watched the golf last night it was probably like a par on a difficult hole like the 11th because obviously there were a lot of challenges this year, particularly in the build up to it and, with the new off time, the simple fact is less people are watching TV on a Saturday afternoon at 4pm than they are in the early evening. We knew this would be the case.”. “The share is fantastic and is always the most important figure in television,” he added. “It was the first sunny day in the south of England for a very long time and I’m not going to blame families for not staying inside after all the bad weather we’ve had recently. I’d have liked to have had more viewers, but it was pretty much what I was expecting and not many programmes or events get six million watching them in the modern day.
