If there is any silver lining to the dramatic void at York this week, it may benefit Doncaster. They are starkly contrasting venues in terms of local wealth but the Yorkshire public, denied one of its summer sporting highlights, could now be more inclined to patronise the next available opportunity in the south of the county.

It is no secret that Doncaster has struggled for crowds this year. However, when the redeveloped course opened with the St Leger meeting last September, it was an instant success. The hope of Adam Waterworth and his team must be that their flagship meeting, which starts on September 10, will feed off the Knavesmire disappointment and revive fortunes once again.

Problems encountered by the packed Saturday crowd last year have been addressed, with extra ticket barriers erected and additional space provided in the family enclosure. Tickets for Ladies' Day, the Thursday, are also shifting predictably well.

It does not require huge intelligence to identify that the least popular day will be the Wednesday, which stages a card unworthy of a meeting of this stature. Indeed, in a year when York added an extra day to the Ebor fixture, Doncaster would have been well advised to reduce its Leger meeting from four days to three.

Even creative marketing may be useless, for the Wednesday has its theme in place. All sponsors are valuable in racing but it must be said that a day branding itself as the ‘Construction News Raceday in association with Heating and Ventilation News' does not exactly sound box-office.

A funny thing happened on Newmarket's July Course last Friday night. Matt Chapman, the perma-tanned but highly professional host of such At The Races staples as ‘Get On' and ‘The Sunday Forum', may have been reliving his dreams of an alternative career in attending the Boyzone concert after racing but he did not anticipate being buttonholed by the boy-band's singer, Ronan Keating telling him earnestly: “I love your show.”

Chapman claims, perhaps disingenuously, that he did not immediately recognise the teen idol and had to be told the identity of his flatterer by friends. It is not clear, however, who Keating really believed he was speaking to ...

Week by week, tales of the phenomenon that is racing's Ladies' Days become ever more implausible. Who would have believed, for instance, that the East Midlands backwater of Southwell, where crowds for all-weather meetings are usually counted by the dozen, would have been packed to the gunnels for its jumps fixture last Sunday, simply through the trusted expedient of the magical theme?

Southwell - admirably spruced up for the day - stopped counting at about 5,000, which constituted a size of crowd they had not seen for 15 years.

Among the revellers were several folk in top hat and tails, looking as oblivious to the real business of the day as a group of inebriated women overheard at another such occasion the previous week. One of the females, pausing from her ardent supping of fizz, piped up: “D'you know girls, there's horse racing on here today, too ...”

This column bows to no one in its admiration of BBC racing, both on TV and radio, when it is engaged on the biggest events. It would be remiss, however, not to return to an old bugbear, that of the BBC racing pages on Ceefax. Even if we accept the corporation's reasons for scaling them down, the Beeb must surely be more professional about its content. Last Sunday, the headline item still referred to the Shergar Cup, run eight days previously.

Robert Lucey-Butler is a fine young jump jockey, as a number of trainers are now recognising, but whenever his name is mentioned, that old Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue comes to mind. Not his fault, of course, but Diary considers him to have made a wise move in abbreviating his monicker for newspaper and racecard purposes. Henceforth, he appears simply as Robert L Butler.