Being AP

Northern Irish jockey Tony McCoy (commonly called ‘AP’) was a star of the horse-racing scene for over two decades, riding 4,357 winners until he reluctantly retired in April 2015, a month before his forty-first birthday. This mildly diverting doc tracks the run-up to that decision and its effect on AP and his family.

It’s a morose affair, tempered as it is by McCoy’s depressive musings on how life might end at 40. You feel for his wife, Chanelle, as she tiptoes around her moody husband, only once dropping her smiling front to admit that AP’s success meant he ‘became a really selfish person’. Only turf aficionados will care enough to stick with the entire film, but there are flashes of wider interest: ‘Would you like to be the face of peanut butter?’ asks AP’s commercial manager as retirement approaches. The look on his face is briefly devastating.