There's a clue in the name

 The BBC Sports Personality of the Year has always been a must watch Christmas event in our household. I will admit that as the Beeb have less and less live sport to show it has become a bit less enjoyable than it used to be, but there has usually been a good list of candidates for the big prize. We will just ignore the fact that Ryan Giggs managed to win it one year. That's a bit like Danny Willett winning the Masters!!

There always used to be silly sports challenges which audience members would participate in even if they were not up for the grand prize, but those little off piste diversions seem to have disappeared too.

This year, though, we are in a very strange place. as has become the trend, the six major prize winners have been announced beforehand and I am now doubting whether I really wish to watch it, particularly as Lewis Hamilton, the contestant with the least personality, is favourite to win it. I am not sure though whether Stuart Broad or Ronnie O'Sullivan might run him close in a grey man competition, unless that is, Keir Starmer is in the running.

OK,  Lewis is world champion for the 'n'th time in a minority sport which is boring and monotonous to a large part of the population and, yes, I know golf is probably tarred with the same brush, but if he is best of a bad bunch I really despair.

Tyson Fury must agree with me as he has withdrawn his name from the competition, although whether the BBC have noticed I am not sure.

Joe Wicks read out the nominations, he must have been thinking that he had done more this year to win it than the nominee's themselves. And what about Major Tom, He has scooped up most of the awards this year, walking round the garden must have counted as an endurance event as far as he was concerned? Jordan Henderson  will get the Northern Powerhouse vote, but I would like to see Hollie Doyle win, as she has the profile and  all the current attributes of a 2020 success story, just don't get me onto the 'Lewis Hamilton for a Knighthood' campaign

Neeeoooow!

Pimples

On Sunday, Lewis Hamilton, a racing driver supported by a team of over 1000 people, who races maybe twenty times a year and has only one serious rival, won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award for 2014.

He beat Rory McIlory, a golfer, into second place. McIlroy has probably fifty rivals, all capable of beating him on their day. He plays probably 30 times a year, and is supported by a small team which includes his caddy, coach,  management team and various suppliers and sponsors.

Whether it was the right decision is taking up a lot of column inches in the newspapers at the moment. Hamilton won the F1 World Championship, which he has won previously. McIlroy won the Open Championship and the US PGA championship. No European has ever done that before in the same year. He also won the Bridgestone Invitational and the PGA championship at Wentworth. He was also part of the European Ryder Cup team who defeated the USA.

McIlroy has a personality, Hamilton is a bit dull. So it would seem that petrolhead's took the trouble to vote, whereas golfers didn't.

Sadly it's another sign of the fading star which SPOTY has become. SPOTY has always been a must watch in our family, and I can remember the sixties programmes when the BBC had most of the sporting coverage in the World to use to produce their programme. Henry Cooper won the title twice, and he never really won anything of significance in his sport. David Steel was sent out to face the barrage of West Indian fast bowling and almost single-handedly saved England from ignominy. He won it for true British spunk.

More recently, however, the BBC have struggled to find any sporting coverage to populate the programme with as Sky and now BT, hoover up all the best events. The 2014 show reached new depths with repeated voiceovers by Eddie 'the idiot' Butler, listing the names of great British sports personalities, but showing almost no action at all.

The BBC must have know the writing was on the wall when in 2009, a year with no Olympics, World Cup or Commonwealth Games, the winner was Ryan Giggs, an aging Welsh footballer who is best know outside football for bedding his own brother's wife. Jenson Button came second that year so even the petrolhead's must have been bored with the whole thing.

Aging pop band Simple Minds opened the show on Sunday, and that, sadly,  is a suitable  phrase to refer to the BBC blazers who masterminded the whole thing.