The people have spoken ... the bastards,” a waspish Dick Tuck observed following his failure to make the California State Senate in 1966. At the end of a year in which electorates throughout the UK and beyond have proved time and again they simply cannot be trusted to make even the simplest choice, it is a sentiment with which BBC panjandrums were happy not to concur at the end of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year beano in Birmingham on Sunday night.
They had been utterly terrified the Great British Public would select a one-two-three of Andy Murray, Mo Farah and Gareth Bale – three sporting high-achievers who it was known would not be present in person on the night.
The hot favourite Murray duly collected his third silver camera from Lennox Lewis poolside at his Miami training camp, eliciting giggles via video link upon revealing his better half had voted for the housewives’ favourite and token oldie, the showjumper Nick Skelton, who finished third.
The triathlete Alistair Brownlee split the pair, finishing second and it was perhaps his place on the podium that was the source of most intrigue. Resolutely friendless in the betting for this award after winning gold in the triathlon at Rio, Brownlee became a major contender when he abandoned his own chance of winning the final race of the World Triathlon Series to carry his brother, Jonny, who was suffering from heat exhaustion, over the line. While it would be churlish to demean the heroics of a double Olympic gold medallist, this was not so much an award for achievement as one for slightly grudging fraternal humanitarianism.
The nod to Brownlee’s selflessness continued a fine tradition of British contrarianism and appreciation of bulldog spirit which began when the 14,517 postcard voters in the original 1954 incarnation of this event plumped for Christopher Chataway, who was Sir Roger Bannister’s pacemaker. Two decades later, considerably more voters went on to bestow the gong upon the cricketer David Steele for taking a hideously painful pounding from the Australian pace duo Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in an Ashes series England actually lost.
No doubt they were charmed by stories about the Test debut of a bespectacled “bank clerk who went to war”, whose famous Spinal Tap moment on debut at Lord’s came when he got lost on his way to the Long Room, walked down one flight of stairs too many and ended up near the toilets, before rushing back upstairs to the crease and narrowly avoiding the ignominy of becoming the first batsman in Test history to be timed out.
The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd: both were discernible on an evening when a glitzy awards ceremony featuring enough inspirational montages to power a million Rocky movies kicked off with a rendition of Feeling Good from the aforementioned musical by local soulstress Laura Mvula. Like Robbie Williams and Gareth Malone’s Invictus Choir, she performed before 1,000 of the good and the great of British sport and 12,000 fans before handing over to the holy broadcasting trinity of Gabby Logan, Clare Balding and “the main man” Gary Lineker. With the exception of the Duke of Cambridge, Roy Keane and the grandmother of the gold medal-winning swimmer Adam Peaty, all present seemed to be shortlisted for the trophy on which Lineker famously lacerated a finger last year.
Before Murray accepted it with a gracious and amusing speech, there were cameos from assorted other contenders including Peaty, a vision in his Bernard Manning-esque maroon crushed velvet dickie bow, followed by cycling’s most successful newlyweds Jason and Laura Kenny. During a revelatory video in which the man of the house, by his own admission one of the most boring human beings alive, was archly portrayed as ... well, one of the most boring human beings alive, the couple made off with the show on the back of a surprisingly well-judged comic turn. Who knew the 2008 Spoty winner Sir Chris Hoy lives in the cupboard under their stairs?
There were other winners. Featuring no end of clips from that famous Jamie Vardy party, the montage devoted to the Team of the Year Leicester City’s preposterous Premier League fairytale clearly moved Lineker and led inevitably to Claudio Ranieri being crowned Coach of the Year. The 15-year-old Paralympian Ellie Robinson was the obvious choice for young Spoty, while the splendidly monikered one-time ne’er-do-well turned boxing coach Marcellus Baz received the Unsung Hero award from the comedian Eddie Izzard and the Hillsborough campaigner Margaret Aspinall. Stateside, the American athletes Simone Biles and Michael Phelps also got nods in a jamboree punctuated by Icelandic thunderclaps, chats with assorted contenders and – oh yes – yet another tear-jerking montage featuring Great Britain’s Olympic gold-winning hockey team and their captain, Kate Richardson-Walsh. The ducts were all but dry by the time the anti-bullying campaigner Ben Smith picked up the Helen Rollason award for running just the 401 marathons in as many days.
As expected on a night of celebration, assorted elephants in the very large and crowded room went resolutely ignored. It was perhaps the absence of the three-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome, whose record remains resolutely unblemished, from the shortlist for the main award on the night before his team principal at Sky is due to answer hard questions in parliament that jarred the most. But on an evening where excessive mawkishness is not only expected but tolerated the last word was always going to go to Murray for scoring his first Christmas No1.
(Guardian service)
