I did enjoy this take on the BBC sports personality from the excellent Jonathan Liew.
In a year like this, there were dozens; hundreds, perhaps, some of whom were commemorated with no more than a blink-and-you-missed-it appearance on screen.
One can well imagine the fleeting kerfuffle in the household of gold-medal-winning canoeist Ed McKeever. “There he is! Oh, he’s gone...” Yes, at the end of the evening they gave away a little camera and everyone stood up and cried a little bit, but by that time the best bits of the evening had already been and gone.
For the real glory of Sports Personality is to be found not in the big awards, or the pompous voiceovers, or the pretentious montages compiled by somebody at the BBC who clearly sees himself as this generation’s Fritz Lang.
Rather, it was all about the little details, the inevitable curios that arise when you try to grasp the entire world of sport with a single giant claw and put it in a room for the night.
The sight of Dave Brailsford wearing a suit for the first time in his life. The use of throbbing rock music in an unsuccessful attempt to make sailing look exciting.
The annual four-second mention of rugby league. The rather inventive idea of getting everyone in the auditorium to unite in a rendition of the Poznan.
So anybody expecting to find the real essence of sport in a meretricious light show, pockmarked by quasi-celebrities and soundtracked by eight-second snatches of pop music, was clearly looking in the wrong place.
The entire Olympic tennis tournament was summarised in a single stroke — the winning stroke — while we were treated to around half a minute of Andy Murray throwing water on his face. Cricket, rugby union and at least a dozen other notable sports were shrugged off in a matter of seconds.
But then, Sports Personality stopped being about the sport long ago. Those who yearn for the days when a modest invited audience gathered at BBC Television Centre to hear the measured tones of Harry Carpenter are rather missing the point.
We now live in an age where pop stars get tattoos on the inside of their lips and wear dresses made of bacon. We may still be in the grip of financial austerity, but artistic austerity died out long ago. As did Harry Carpenter.
What transpired instead was three hours of pure, unfettered bombast. No sentiment was too mawkish to be expressed; no concept too grandiose to indulge; no two athletes too different to be paired up (Andrew Strauss and Martina Navratilova uniting to present an award to Brailsford was a particularly surreal choice); no moment so solemn that it could not be further consecrated by the earnest warble of Emeli Sande, the gratuitous deployment of our armed forces or the reflected lustre of a minor royal.
So it was something of a relief that the eventual winner, Bradley Wiggins, treated the event with irreverence it so badly needed, swaggering onto stage and immediately picking up the big trophy on the table.
After going on to call Sue Barker “Susan”, he revealed that he had spent an unspecified period of time before the start of the ceremony “in the bar”. It was a virtuoso performance.
In maintaining a knowing detachment from the entire gaudy spectacle before turning up at the end to win the whole thing, Wiggins achieved a high-wire balancing act at least the equal of anything he achieved on the bike. Beat that next year, Chris Froome.
In a year like this, there were dozens; hundreds, perhaps, some of whom were commemorated with no more than a blink-and-you-missed-it appearance on screen.
One can well imagine the fleeting kerfuffle in the household of gold-medal-winning canoeist Ed McKeever. “There he is! Oh, he’s gone...” Yes, at the end of the evening they gave away a little camera and everyone stood up and cried a little bit, but by that time the best bits of the evening had already been and gone.
For the real glory of Sports Personality is to be found not in the big awards, or the pompous voiceovers, or the pretentious montages compiled by somebody at the BBC who clearly sees himself as this generation’s Fritz Lang.
Rather, it was all about the little details, the inevitable curios that arise when you try to grasp the entire world of sport with a single giant claw and put it in a room for the night.
The sight of Dave Brailsford wearing a suit for the first time in his life. The use of throbbing rock music in an unsuccessful attempt to make sailing look exciting.
The annual four-second mention of rugby league. The rather inventive idea of getting everyone in the auditorium to unite in a rendition of the Poznan.
So anybody expecting to find the real essence of sport in a meretricious light show, pockmarked by quasi-celebrities and soundtracked by eight-second snatches of pop music, was clearly looking in the wrong place.
The entire Olympic tennis tournament was summarised in a single stroke — the winning stroke — while we were treated to around half a minute of Andy Murray throwing water on his face. Cricket, rugby union and at least a dozen other notable sports were shrugged off in a matter of seconds.
But then, Sports Personality stopped being about the sport long ago. Those who yearn for the days when a modest invited audience gathered at BBC Television Centre to hear the measured tones of Harry Carpenter are rather missing the point.
We now live in an age where pop stars get tattoos on the inside of their lips and wear dresses made of bacon. We may still be in the grip of financial austerity, but artistic austerity died out long ago. As did Harry Carpenter.
What transpired instead was three hours of pure, unfettered bombast. No sentiment was too mawkish to be expressed; no concept too grandiose to indulge; no two athletes too different to be paired up (Andrew Strauss and Martina Navratilova uniting to present an award to Brailsford was a particularly surreal choice); no moment so solemn that it could not be further consecrated by the earnest warble of Emeli Sande, the gratuitous deployment of our armed forces or the reflected lustre of a minor royal.
So it was something of a relief that the eventual winner, Bradley Wiggins, treated the event with irreverence it so badly needed, swaggering onto stage and immediately picking up the big trophy on the table.
After going on to call Sue Barker “Susan”, he revealed that he had spent an unspecified period of time before the start of the ceremony “in the bar”. It was a virtuoso performance.
In maintaining a knowing detachment from the entire gaudy spectacle before turning up at the end to win the whole thing, Wiggins achieved a high-wire balancing act at least the equal of anything he achieved on the bike. Beat that next year, Chris Froome.
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