At the end of a joyful and often inspirational process marked by honesty, humility, a roster of outstanding candidates and the willingness of all parties to submit to multiple interviews, a public vote resulted in a richly deserved winner. Ben Stokes, who well before polling opened had made his first appearance on the programme as one of three England cricketers introduced by Gary Lineker as “World Cup run-out hero Jason Roy, captain Eoin Morgan and main award winner Ben Stokes” was indeed presented with the main award. Lineker’s faux pas was swiftly corrected, and surely a slip of the tongue rather than evidence of outlandish vote-rigging, with Stokes already the bookmakers’ runaway favourite and England’s cricketers also providing the team and moment of the year.
So concluded a broadcast that had started some four hours earlier, with the BBC so excited by the stars’ arrival that they broadcast it twice. Radzi Chinyanganya and Amy Irons helmed a vaguely serious main programme while Reece Parkinson and the singer and Fulham forward Chelcee Grimes did a more chaotic youth-culture version, both simultaneously broadcast on the red button (the colour of which is precisely the kind of completely invented pro-Labour bias the new government is so angry about, and the content of which is precisely the kind of completely unnecessary fluff that the BBC will have to can as a result). This meant that for much of the time a majority of the people on the red carpet were being employed to interview people on the red carpet, and that they often had little option but to simply interview each other. “What are you looking forward to after the show? Last year there was this mad cheese fondue,” asked Grimes of Parkinson. “What is it that you want to ask Dina Asher-Smith?” asked Parkinson of Grimes – one of the key themes of this period was interviewers interviewing other interviewers about the prospect of interviewing someone who wasn’t an interviewer – and also: “Are we really going to ask Ben Stokes to put his hand inside the sack?”
This sack was a Christmas stocking stuffed with random questions written on little slips of paper. Stokes was asked which TV character he would choose to be and, perhaps unwisely given his history, plumped for Peaky Blinders’ Tommy Shelby, who is known for being extremely violent around pubs. Nicola Adams was asked for the most ridiculous fact she knew, prompting a completely blank expression and a very awkward silence, which ended only when Grimes interjected with a story about her teeth and something about the reproductive system of seahorses.
Delivery of infant seahorses has one key similarity with winning the Sports Personality of the Year award: it is done by males. Not since Zara Phillips in 2006 has a woman received the honour, and of the two women on this year’s shortlist the first to be introduced on the main stage, Katarina Johnson-Thompson, did not exactly help her prospects of victory by admitting her hope that “2020’s going to be my year”. As if, with only breaking the British heptathlon record in winning at the world championships in October to boast about, this one had been a little underwhelming.
Asher-Smith had been “honoured to be considered part of the top six” while Stokes also played down his achievements. “People have said this year’s been redemption,” he said. “It’s not, I’ve just been out there doing my job. I don’t know if I’ve explained that very well.”
Raheem Sterling, who was still playing a game against Arsenal as the broadcast commenced, had a good excuse for being absent; Lewis Hamilton, interviewed from an unspecified family event, did not. “Sorry I’m not there tonight, I’m here,” he said. Curiously, when he was named runner-up, in the live vote his trophy turned out to be “here” also.
The modesty of the nominees stood in contrast to an occasion that as ever tended towards the bloated, buffed and boastful. Some presenters seemed convinced that this is, in fact, the most important occasion in sport. “When you think about this, where does this rank in terms of your own sporting achievements,” someone actually asked the two-time Olympic gold-medallist Kelly Holmes about the prospect of being part of a four-person team pedalling the trophy into Aberdeen’s P&J Live Arena.
Other presenters seemed convinced that everyone they saw was the most important person they could see: at one point in the build-up Parkinson said DJ Ironik, whose hit-making history compares unfavourably with that of Kajagoogoo or Bob the Builder, had been “the sound of 95% of this country’s childhood – and everyone watching will feel the same way”.
But there were also moments of genuine poignancy and emotion. Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson did not even make it to the stage dry-eyed as her lifetime of achievement was celebrated, while the winner of the Helen Rollason award for achievement in the face of adversity, Doddie Weir – who irrespective of his other achievements deserved recognition for his mustard-and-blue tartan suit alone – was a source of both inspiration and humour. “As a Scottish rugby player in the 90s, this is the closest I ever got to a trophy,” he quipped.
It is a fact of sport that the more trophies you get, the better your chances of picking up more, as the night’s big winner would once again prove.
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