Murray Walker's Motorsport Madness

Introduction

It's that time of year for celebrity fronted novelty Christmas DVDs, so prepare for blunders, mishaps and hi-jinks all presented by a recognisable figure taking great hilarity in it all. The first so far is Murray Walker's Motorsport Madness, a DVD in which the legendary F1 commentator presents and narrates a series of crazy events, crashes and explosions from the world of motorsport.

Encompassing MotoGP, aeroplanes, drag boats and automobiles of practically every variety, this 54 minute DVD looks at crazy stunts and big crashes.

Video

The DVD is 16:9 but does switch between widescreen and 4:3 according to the aspect ratio of the footage. Just as the aspect ratio is variable, so is the quality as you get recent MotoGP coverage of the highest quality with some crashes caught on amateur video. Oddly there are replays, just in case you missed it the first time, but the DVD format allows you to scan back and watch things again so I didn't quite understand the point of these.

Audio

A clear enough Dolby Digital stereo soundtrack but sadly virtually no sounds of the events shown, all be have is Murray basically providing an audio descriptive track, with some terrible jokes and some horrendously annoying and repetitive music.

Conclusion

It's sad to say but Murray Walker has almost become a parody of himself - the PR bumf includes his famous phrases "Unless I am very much mistaken..." and "Aaand they're off…!", with Walker presenting the footage from the National Motor Museum, standing in front of various automobiles including Del Boy's Reliant Robin.

The disc is most notable for the complete omission of any F1 coverage - the DVD's tagline is "The greatest smashes in Motorsport history", yet there is no mention of 1998 Belgian Grand Prix or any of the enormous crashes that have occurred in F1 this season - maybe the FIA wouldn't allow them to use the footage. The only F1 cars on the disc were in the first section - PR stunts where Jenson Button in his Honda raced a motorcycle and powerboat over a quarter mile and Nick Heidfeld driving his BMW around in the snow of San Moritz.

I expected to really like this but was amazed at just how bad it was. I'm not sure whether Murray Walker wrote the script himself but his narration was unspeakably bad. At less than an hour, it's hardly value for money and it's not the sort of disc that you'll sit down and watch many times.

I'm sure there are many better motorsport DVDs around that are more worthy of your time and money and would make better stocking fillers.