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There are those who will tell you that the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year award is bloated, irrelevant, facile, annoying and increasingly dumbed down. But even on a night of few surprises – Andy Murray, as expected, romped home with more votes than the other contenders combined while Sir Alex Ferguson was greeted with the wary acclamation that you might reserve for a retired champion pitbull – two things stood out.
First, the show had 8.6m viewers at its peak, roughly a seventh of the UK's population, while 717,454 votes were cast, a figure not far off the population of Leeds. Second, the show still attracts controversy and confusion, even when the final outcome is as certain as the dawn.
Some criticisms you hear every year. They are the annual Sunday Night, Monday Morning laments from those who claim when the programme rebranded itself from Sports Review to Sports Personality of the Year in 1999 it became as shiny and polished and hollow as a Christmas bauble.
There is some truth to that. The show has been fattened up, like a turkey before Christmas, to fill time in the schedules and space in the big-city arena halls it now visits. It was appropriate that the Sports Personality was up against X Factor, for it increasingly resembles it. However its core has not undergone any grand makeover. Not really. It has always been a mildly diverting slab of pre-Christmas froth.
It is just that you, me, us, the world has changed. A generation ago there was no Sky or YouTube, so Sports Personality offered a genuine one-stop slot to rewatch the year's sporting highlights. Reality TV changed the rules on how such shows were done, too.
The second stream of comment on Sunday's night programme drifted more into outright puzzlement. How could Mo Farah – who finished fourth last year, despite two Olympic gold medals – miss out on the podium again despite winning a 5,000m and 10,000m double at the world championships in Moscow and possessing personality to burn?
There were those on Twitter wondering whether latent racism might be an explanation but in the past 30 years, the Sports Personality of the Year award has been won by, among others, Linford Christie, Daley Thompson, Lennox Lewis, Kelly Holmes and Fatima Whitbread.
Others pointed out that Bradley Wiggins received 492,064 votes in the 2012 Sports Personality Awards – the most ever – after his Tour de France and Olympic gold medal double, while Chris Froome, who was arguably even more impressive in winning the Tour, only managed sixth with 37,343 votes.
In truth there is not much point trying to deeply analyse the whims of the great British public. In 2006 we gratefully tugged our forelocks to Zara Philips, the 15th in line to the throne, after she won the three-day eventing at the World Equestrian Games – even though at the time equestrianism ranked 16th out of 20th in a survey detailing which sport the British public most wanted success in.
In 2009, with no obvious candidate, the award somehow became a lifetime achievement gong for Ryan Giggs. In other years, the most obvious candidate wins. So it goes.
The obvious problem is, how do you forge sporting excellence and something as "personality" into an award? The answer, of course, is that you can't. Not really Perhaps we can say this: in a year when there is a unique achievement by a British sports star in a popular sport then they will usually win – see Mark Cavendish in 2011, Wiggins in 2012 and Murray in 2013. In a year with fewer British success stories, personality tends to become more important.
In 1975, for instance, the award went to David Steele, a 33-year-old with a silver hair and large spectacles, who was plucked from county cricket to face Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. On his England debut, he lost his way from dressing room to the Lord's Long Room, yet still made 50 and 45, prompting the Sun's Clive Taylor to describe him as "the bank clerk who went to war". But the rule does not always hold. In 1988 Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards, the ski-jumper who didn't so much soar as drop, was beaten to the award by Steve Davis despite becoming a worldwide sensation after finishing last in the Winter Olympics.
Still, this viewer found Sunday night's awards more palatable than many, particularly because of the genuinely moving segment during which Anne Williams was posthumously honoured for fighting for a new inquest into her son Kevin's death at Hillsborough in 1989.
As for the placings among the top 10, it is perhaps wise to remember this. Whoever wins X Factor is not necessarily the best singer; whoever wins Strictly Come Dancing does not necessarily do the best rhumba. And when it comes to the BBC's sporting equivalent, the same rules apply.
Breakdown of the public vote
Andy Murray 401,470
Leigh Halfpenny 65,913
AP McCoy 57,854
Mo Farah 51,945
Sir Ben Ainslie 48,140
Chris Froome 37,343
Hannah Cockroft 26,151
Christine Ohuruogu 13,179
Justin Rose 9,833
Ian Bell 5,626
Total votes: 717,454
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