The new-look Let’s Go, streamlined, trim and with the accent on sport, comes back for its second season on ITV, starting on Saturday afternoon next week.

Horse racing (flat and steeplechasing), professional wrestling and boxing—the most popular sports in the ITV ratings—will be the main regular items in the programme. Out are the dog shows, dancing and off-beat activities.

Racing will be “on” – from courses in almost every part of the network area. So will wrestling — by special request. Amateur boxing will come into the programme planning, probably every fortnight, after the season starts in October.

There will be athletics, too, and motor racing, plus the classified football results and full sports news and results.

The racing outlook is good. Let’s Go will take three or four races from the chosen meeting, spotlight any feature event, give the betting market moves, interview trainers, jockeys and paddock personalities and sum up prospects.

Said Peter Moor, ITV racing adviser: “We’ve got a good team, and I believe we provide the best racing coverage. Certainly that is our aim all the time.

“The courses we cover are all good for the viewers, and we do have plenty of first-class racing. In fact, the only thing our critics demand is —more racing.” Ripon is the scene of next Saturday’s meeting, with the St Leger Trial as the highlight.

Wrestling, which shares the first programme of the new series, also seems to be the sport of which many viewers cannot get enough. Their critical letters have demanded wrestling every week. And that is what they are going to get — 45 minutes each week, with some of the most colourful characters in the game.

So look out for Canadian-Indian Billy Two Rivers; European star Tibor Szkacs, whose contest with Mike Marino in Leeds during the first Let’s Go series was generally rated in wrestling circles to be the best TV bout of the entire season; and Britain’s champions, Billy Joyce, Ernie Riley and Norman Walsh. And coming over to wrestle here are the 16st Japanese Great Togo, giant Bert Stein from Germany and Hungarian ex-Olympic competitor Mihalyi Kuti.

The proportion of “More, please,” letters from women viewers during the summer was incredibly high for a sport that prides itself on its masculinity.

Fashion shows will be featured once a month. But they will be fashion shows with a difference, where the surroundings and background tie up with the clothes.

Not for Let’s Go the parade of models on a platform. As producer Stephen Wade says: “We think that’s dull. If we want to show a model in travel clothes, we’ll put her on a train, or in a plane.”

Tim Brinton and Roger Malone will feed news and comment into the programme between items and at the end, when the results are ticker-taping into the studio.

Brinton, ITN newscaster and Roving Report reporter, took over from Berkeley Smith as link man in the last series. Malone, ex-Fleet-street sports journalist, is now on the staff of Alpha Television. Interviews and comments are his job in Let’s Go.

There are plans, too, for a specially-designed electric score-board to bring the football results to viewers within seconds of the scores being known.

Cameras will show the results as Malone comments. Then, when they are complete, there will be a classified run-through for a Pools coupon check.

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EVERY Saturday afternoon Studio ‘A’ at the Alpha Television Theatre becomes the nerve centre for the biggest networking operation attempted on British television.

From one o’clock until five, “Let’s Go” is on the air to all television areas in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Producer Alan Olivers with his director, lead a team of technicians, sound and camera crews, telecommunication engineers and outside broadcast crews who may be stationed anywhere in the country, sending back to Aston sound and vision signals showing the country at work and play.

Every Saturday four or five Outside Broadcast units are out and about covering events which appeal to all members of the family.

• For Mother, a fashion show, or Joe Loss playing for lunchtime dancing in Coventry.
• Father is taken on a visit to a boxing or wrestling match, a race meeting and perhaps a bathing beauty competition for good measure.
• For the youngsters it may be a pantomime, an ice show, or a visit to a busy locomotive depot.

Finally, at 4.30 p.m. “Let’s Go” provides a full service of sports results — football, rugby, racing and summaries of the big sporting events of the afternoon.

Over twenty cameras, five complete mobile units, and over 400 technicians are working throughout the day in all corners of the country, bringing the world to Aston.

Inside the studio control centre, Alan Chivers and his team work with split second precision, passing on this ambitious kaleidoscope to the viewers at home.

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