Is calling John McCririck obnoxious, egomaniac and sexist too cruel?

The television personality John McCririck, who has died aged 79, was a fat, obnoxious, egomaniac. That was what he used to tell interviewers, anyway, choosing to also dub himself: ‘sad’, ‘resentful’, and ‘a loud-mouthed, bigoted bore’.

‘I am not a pleasant person,’ was how he once summed things up. ‘I bear grudges, I harbour resentments, I never forgive, ever … I don’t have many friends, and I don’t want them. I don’t like being indebted to anyone. I’m always myself and that’s an unpleasant person.’

The Great British public, whose screens were jollified by the bejewelled horse-racing and betting pundit for more than three decades, tended to agree. Indeed, many would also venture that, throughout his noisy career in the public eye, McCririck’s myriad of shortcomings included being a quite appalling misogynist, too.

‘The best thing is for men to go out with ugly girls, because the ugly girls are grateful for what they get,’ was how the whiskery Old Harrovian explained his view on relationships. ‘Always marry below you. Never marry an attractive woman. Women who are not attractive are far better. They look after their men.’

That ‘Big Mac’ tended to make such remarks in the presence of Jenny, the woman he married in 1971 and nicknamed ‘The Booby’ (after a South American bird which is ‘stupid and pathetically easy to catch and squawks a lot’) was all the more unedifying.

Other women tended to be generally ‘ghastly’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘awful’.

Those brave enough to work with him in the betting ring were given the on-air monikers ‘Saucy Minx’, ‘Pouting Heiress’ and ‘Female’ and regularly subjected to public abuse. ‘They moan. God, they moan,’ he once declared, regarding female colleagues. ‘Headaches, periods, you have to put up with all this moaning when you employ women.’

These, and other outspoken remarks, formed part of a pantomime act which over the past 15 years of his life turned McCririck from that cigar-chomping daytime TV racing presenter — known for his Victorian sideburns, vulgar gold jewellery, and tweed deerstalker hats — into a noted reality TV villain.

It had begun with a 2005 appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, stomping around in a pair of greying Y-fronts and throwing huge tantrums when deprived of Diet Coke.

The show culminated in him being booted out by the public, following an argument with the Danish actress and former wife of Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, during which she declared: ‘I find you disgusting and obnoxious.’ She said McCririck’s poor personal habits made her ‘feel like throwing up in the bathroom’.

After listening to her various complaints, he responded calmly: ‘I think you’re hypnotised by my body.’

There followed an equally fractious appearance on Celebrity Wife Swap, where politician Edwina Currie moved into his home and tried (but signally failed) to make him cook, clean or improve his hygiene. ‘I hate that bossy woman,’ he declared.

Soon afterwards, McCririck was voted the second most hated man in Britain; only ‘Mr Nasty’ Simon Cowell was more unpopular. ‘The public loathed me, as I knew they would, and quite right, too,’ he announced. ‘I’m a fat, public school educated, Right-wing journalist, four of the most hated groups in the country.’

Yet, as so often in public life, a caricature never tells the entire story. For behind the flamboyant dress sense and boorish persona there also lay a passionate and hugely knowledgeable man who had stamped a unique and at times important footprint on public life.

During his long career as a racing journalist, he ran a string of award-winning investigations, campaigned tirelessly for the rights of both racehorses and ordinary race-going punters, and developed a rare gift for bringing the colour and vibrancy of the betting jungle into the nation’s living rooms.

John McCririck was born in Surbiton in 1940, and raised in Jersey, where his parents Jim and Pauline made a fortune in property.

Sent to boarding school at the age of six, he was repeatedly caned ‘because I never conformed’ and was ‘an unpleasant person’.

Having lost his father to a heart attack at the age of 14, he devoted his teenage years at Harrow to earning a shilling as the school’s resident bookmaker, leaving in the late Fifties with just three O-levels.

There followed a stint as a trainee at the Dorchester Hotel, where he met Elizabeth Taylor, but was reputedly sacked for spilling hot soup into the lap of a diner. In 1961, the legalisation of bookmakers offered the chance of a career change.

‘I clearly recall thinking that betting shops were the future, and that if I had the entrepreneurial skills I would open a chain of them and become a multimillionaire,’ he later said.

In the event, McCririck had no such skills. Indeed, catastrophic financial losses forced him to soon call time on his career as a bookie. However, his encyclopaedic memory for results then helped secure him a regular income writing form guides.

In 1968, he moved into journalism, joining The Sporting Life, where he went on to win two British Press Awards for doggedly exposing a variety of scams.

One particularly brave investigation exposed a criminal gambling ring who were delaying the broadcast of greyhound races so they could place bets after events had actually started. Another saw him establish that the state-owned Tote bookmaker was cooking its books to reduce payouts to successful racegoers. It led the Home Secretary to order a public investigation from which Woodrow Wyatt, the Tote chairman (and later Lord Wyatt), was lucky to escape with his job.

McCririck’s TV career began in 1981, when he was asked to join ITV’s racing team. He became famed for colourful dispatches from the betting ring, in which he would holler the price of fancied horses and draw attention to extravagant bets, or intriguing pieces of racing trivia.

His ever-more flamboyant appearance would draw huge crowds, and he became famed as a mouthpiece of the common punter, launching noisy critiques of jockeys who rode incompetently, or horses that he believed to be insufficiently hard-ridden.

In the carnival atmosphere of the betting ring, disruptive racegoers would be fended off with withering put-downs such as ‘grow up’ and ‘get off, you nasty little toe-rag!’

‘My thought was always, if I was sitting at home, what would I like to know now, what bit of information would I most like to have from the racecourse? I had the privilege to be there and it was my guiding principle to share that privilege with the viewer,’ he said.

It was an act that continued for more than three decades, until McCririck was forced off the air when Channel 4 decided to modernise its coverage in 2012. He responded by suing the broadcaster for ageism, claiming £3 million, but when the case came to tribunal, he lost, costing £100,000 in legal fees.

The judgment found that ‘bigoted’ McCririck’s ‘arrogant and confrontational style’ put off viewers, and that the broadcaster was within its rights to sack him in order to avoid being tarnished by his ‘boorish, obnoxious and sexist’ public image.

Though viewing figures dropped by a quarter following his departure, he was never invited back, and was forced to while away his days in the chaotic mews house in London’s Primrose Hill, adorned with pictures of himself, which he shared with Jenny for most of their married life.

The couple, who married in 1971, had met at a party.

‘The Booby had a yellow Labrador called Simon — I’d always wanted a yellow lab, so when The Booby came along at the end of the piece of string, I had to have her, too,’ he later said.

They never had children (McCririck regarded them as ‘awful things’ saying ‘I hate them, I loathe them’), meaning that Jenny could devote her energies to looking after a small menagerie of cats and dogs, and acting as his full-time manservant. She purportedly rose at 4am to fetch his newspapers, bringing him almond croissants and bananas in bed, and spent the remainder of each day cooking, cleaning, running his baths, and chauffeuring him in their Volvo estate (he never learned to drive).

When they flew together — McCririck liked to holiday in Las Vegas each year — he travelled Business Class while she would sit in the back in economy.

At home, McCririck would drink pink champagne from mid-morning onwards, watch daytime TV (his favourite show was Jeremy Kyle). In occasional interviews, he’d proposition female journalists and devote his energies to insulting public figures.

Not long ago he said the Loose Women presenter Carol McGiffin was ‘gruesome’ and Chris Tarrant had dumped his wife, Ingrid, because she was ‘bad in bed’. Alan Titchmarsh booted him off his chatshow in response.

In another interview, he fantasised about sleeping with a selection of celebrities, including Dawn French (‘It would be fantastic… because there’s meat on her and you’d be roaring with laughter all the time’) and Kate Winslet (‘I like breasts. Always have, and the bigger the better … how The Titanic ever sank with her chest there I’ll never know!’).

As his health failed, and his weight tumbled — he never revealed what he was suffering from — McCririck contemplated his place in history telling the Mail last year that he no longer had any ‘purpose in life’.

He said he wanted his ashes to be spread on a racecourse when he died. ‘I don’t want a funeral, I think it’s selfish. I want a cremation and to be buried at Alexandra Park Racecourse — Booby knows what to do!’

He added: ‘There’s no God up there. When you’re dead, you’re 6ft under. We’re told the ideal place is the right hand of God, but who’d want to sit there for hundreds of millions of years?’

Perhaps now, to his surprise, he will find out.