Last night saw the BBC's annual review of the sporting year, broadcast as 'The Sports Personality of the Year 2012.' There was a time when I would have watched this annual event, glued to the television and desperate to hear of the exploits of 'my heroes'; not any more. In keeping with the modern mania for exaggerating everything to do with so-called celebrity, this programme has become an overblown, and very long, opportunity for the BBC to put on a ludicrous extravaganza at the expense of licence payers. Was all the noise and flashing lights really necessary, or was this a way simply to make the event seem far more important than it really was, in the same way that pop-stars are over-promoted ?
The viewing audience were confronted by 3 presenters none of whom has any great talent for presentation and all of whom have become increasingly innured in the horrible, smarmy world of sucking up to the 'stars'. There was a time when Sue Barker was a delight as the presenter of 'A Question of Sport', but no longer; now her sycophantic giggles at the stupid antics of the teams simply make me turn off. There was a time when Gary Lineker was a breath of fresh air as an expert on football and that's where he should have stayed. There was even a time when Claire Balding talked sense when it came to horse racing, but what on earth caused the BBC to believe she could front shows involving other sports or something so prestigious as 'Sports Personality' used to be ?
Everyone was wonderful; everyone came through SUCH difficult times; everyone was so grateful to their coach, their physio, their medical team, their granny, their cat and so on. It was egregious and one longed for a Danny Blanchflower to walk on and tell them so. Instead, we had the nauseating sight of Sebastian Coe being given a lifetime award and trotting out his own stream of worthless platitudes and inanities. David Beckham, a man far more famous for being famous these days than for any sporting contribution, was called upon to string a few words together for no obvious reason other than who he was. We had the lunacy of the 'Team of the Year' award going to a team that didn't actually exist, the GB Olympic team; this was not a team, it was a bunch of individuals who happened to be at the same event. What madness !
When I read the sports' pages of my Saturday newspaper, I saw that Ladbroke's, the bookmakers' had Bradley Wiggins as odds-on favourite to win the individual award with Jessica Ennis and Andy Murray tipped to fill the minor places. That this was the exact result had me wondering what inside information Ladbroke's had; they are, after all, not so good when it comes to picking horses.
I only watched bits of this over-long nonsense and listened to even less, but I don't think I'll be bothering at all next year. I don't need the BBC to tell me who were the stars of the year and I certainly don't need to listen to the oily and sycophantic tones of those whom they choose to force upon us, whether as presenters, stars or celebrities. All of this glitz and glamour is horribly overdone and our sporting performers ludicrously overvalued and overpaid; perhaps when we come to realise that sport is really of very little importance in the real world, we will start to grow again as a nation.
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