I've been told (I'm too young to remeber!) that there was a fad years ago for records with several grooves (like one of the Monty Python albums): you wouldn't know which groove the needle would pick up, so you wouldn't know what was going to play. They made some discs with a horse race commentary, and at some point they would diverge from each other, as it were, and a different horse would win on each one. You wouldn't know until the end, so you could put bets on the different horses. Whether they had the kind of awful jokes Doodles Weaver perpetrated, I don't know, but the record was a send-up of the idea.

Am I right in thinking that the William Tell Overture is popularly played at the beginning of race meetings in the US? We don't do that kind of thing over here!

Steve