Night Doddie stood tall
NATURALLY, the whole sporting shindig began with a song, a mournful dirge to my ear.
The BBC, we have long realised, has given up comprehensive TV coverage of games and if they can spirit along the annual charade with X Factor-style razzmatazz then they grab it and run with it.
In fact, by then we already knew there was something of a hole in this Sports Personality of the Year. The intro had rolled and contributions were voiced over by five of the six contenders for the crown. One voice was missing — Lewis Hamilton had swerved off track. He was not there in Aberdeen last night. He later joined from his sofa, part in, part out of the jamboree.
‘At home with the Hamiltons,’ said Clare Balding, making the best of it. The great driver’s hair — a finger-in-the-electric-socket confection — was pretty bold pre-watershed.
Well, you can understand why he did not make the trip north. It was a long way to travel and jolly expensive. Perhaps he was saving the planet. But what a cost to the licence-fee payer this party was. Yesterday morning, a BA flight from Heathrow to the Granite City would have set you back £586. Yet the vast cast debunked all the way up there to show with aching pain how the BBC is not Londoncentric. Oh, no. Celtic’s Treble Treble was the first of the sparse sporting clips. Oh, yes. I wonder what Boris Johnson, recent tweaker of the state-funded broadcaster’s tail, made of this profligacy. Those of us of a certain age remember cosier times when Television Centre was an adequate home. There was one reminder of those long satellite delays of boyhood memory. Des Lynam to Frank Bruno in the States back then. This time it was Gary Lineker to Raheem Sterling — in London. A bit of it was One Show stuff — they kept going over to rugby great Gareth Thomas on his journey from Cardiff to Aberdeen on his quattrocycle. It saves on the fare, I guess.
Perhaps the highlight was the recognition of Doddie Weir (below). A proper hero of Scotland beyond the rugby field, he is defying motor neurone disease.
He showed up in a technicolour tartan suit — a bright symbol of his unquenchable optimism as he accepted the Helen Rollason Award. His speech, thanking his wife, as his children’s brave faces watched on, was moving among the schmaltz. This segment even gave us a reminder of the old BBC, the one that actually covered sport wholesale.
Of Weir: ‘Like a mad giraffe,’ intoned the late Bill McLaren. But when it came to Ben Stokes and his majestic strokes of high summer, it was the hoarse voice of Jonathan Agnew that accompanied the pictures.
Nothing wrong with Aggers’ contribution — splendid commentary — but a reminder of how TV has mostly abandoned cricket.
Lineker gave us a glimpse of what he possibly thought was a foregone conclusion, introducing Stokes as the ‘main award winner’ even before the voting started. Oops. Fix! Mystic Gary, as it turned out, was prescient. And then the tickertape flew.