A PAGEANT OF LITTLE SIGNIFICANCE
And the only way to save SPOTY is to vote for Jess
IT could have been worse. They could have invited that charming Sandi Toksvig to join Gary Lineker, Clare Balding and Gabby Logan as one of the hosts. After all, she’s small (‘ heightism!’), half-foreign, holds impeccable views and is apparently contractually obliged to tip up for every other show on BBC radio and television.
Be thankful for small mercies. It could have been much worse.
But the Sports Personality of the Year shindig, which will be broadcast from Belfast on Sunday evening, is still a shadow of the programme it used to be.
Once an intimate affair where the great and the good from the world of sport rubbed shoulders, literally, in Television Centre, it was affectionate and provided gentle amusement. Now, infected like so much else by giganticism, it is a noisy pageant of little significance.
Twelve Green Bottles, they could call it, as that seems to summarise the BBC’s relationship with sport these days. One by one, the games we watch slip away from Auntie’s embrace, leaving the lady stripped almost bare.
It’s rather sad for those who grew up turning to the BBC for proper coverage of proper events. The world has changed, though, and so SPOTY has become a showpiece for a show that has left town.
In Belfast we are promised entertainment from ‘ a drum and bass duo’, presumably because the guitarist is looking for his plectrum, and the piano player has fallen into the River Lagan. Well, they will have to do, even if it means there is less time for Gary Lineker and his scripted screamers.
Yes, for manufactured excitement and that ghastly modern phenomenon, audience participation, Belfast is the place to be on Sunday. And why not? Wouldn’t you hoot with pleasure at the prospect of seeing Lucy Bronze, star footballer, and Max Whitlock, gymnast extraordinaire? The dozen personalities jostling for top spot were selected by a committee, wouldn’t you know? Have we got enough women? Send for Miss Bronze! Are less popular sports represented? Whitlock’s the man! What about the transgender community? Oh no, don’t give them ideas.
Having deliberated upon the case of Tyson Fury, the lippy boxer, the committee allowed his nomination to stand. Fair enough. He is a world champion, after all, and nobody has to vote for him. It is not as if the social and political views of athletes amount to a hill of beans. Whatever they are, they are not ‘role models’.
Achievement in sport is not hard to identify but what is a ‘personality’? Some of the greatest names in our sporting history have won this award — Bobby Moore, Henry Cooper, Sebastian Coe, Daley Thompson and Ian Botham among them, but so, too, did David Steele, the Northamptonshire cricketer, because he stood up to Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in 1975.
The two previous winners have been Andy Murray and Lewis Hamilton, and they are again nominated this time. Is Murray a personality? He is a fine tennis player, hats off, but as for how he presents himself to the world he is as dull as a week in Worthing.
As for Hamilton, the words that Lord Charteris applied to the Duchess of York spring to mind: ‘Vulgar! vulgar! vulgar!’
There will always be puzzling omissions but can it really be that the judges found room for Lucy Bronze, yet overlooked Joe Root, who made two centuries for an England team that reclaimed the Ashes from Australia, and provided such rich entertainment as he did so?
And Root, a puckish chap who smiles easily, is certainly a person- ality. That is not an oversight but a serious error of judgment.
Not that Mr Lineker and his co-hosts will care a tinker’s cuss. The show must go on! And by Jove it will, its mood pitched somewhere between The X Factor and a boy scouts’ jamboree.
Are you enjoying yourself, Belfast? They certainly will. Anybody who doesn’t will face a week in the stocks for disobedience.
If you want a true personality, somebody in whom outstanding achievement sits easily alongside modesty and grace, there is one outstanding candidate. She is a Sheffield lass, has added her husband’s name to her own, and every time she pops up on our screens she reveals why we follow sport. If Jessica Ennis-Hill (left) does not top the bill on Sunday night they might as well consign the show to the knacker’s yard.