I think I am rapidly developing an obsession about the BBC. First it was their OTT patriotic Olympic coverage that got my goat. Then there was and is the never-ending sycophantic fawning over the monarchy births, engagements, marriages, divorces, jubilees. The Beeb just can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s not so much they report the news, more they try to create it. The average Joe, Josephine and Jamaal down the road isn’t intrinsically interested in the monarchy but the constant media frenzy whips up a storm where there would normally be disinterest.

And then there is the dumbed down drama and news departments of which I blogged about recently. And to cap off a thoroughly uninspiring year for BBC TV we were served up the annual grotesque orgy of self- congratulatory cliches and platitudes commonly known as the BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

Of course, it’s not the fault of the athletes themselves. Put any high achiever from any discipline into that format and you are guaranteed to elicit cliches and sickly platitudes. You know the sort of stuff I mean. I couldn’t have done it without the support of my family and my incredible behind the scenes team.It’s all the stuff of dreams – I can’t believe it’s really happening. The sickly stuff just oozes out hour after excruciating hour. Exactly why they can’t believe it I really don’t know. After all, they dedicated most of their lives for precisely this moment.

And the self-satisfied people in the audience just lap it up with little or no thought to the hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens who are currently losing their jobs, losing their homes, and most significantly, losing what’s left of their self-esteem. And little or no thought either to the plain fact that grassroots funding for sport is being decimated by the coalition government. And try hiring your local sports centre for a few hours. It’s likely to bankrupt you for the rest of the month. All this has been neatly airbrushed out the equation by our tax-payer funded public broadcaster.

Notwithstanding the above, it is the idiocy of asking the general public to choose between the glittering array of high achieving athletes that really grates. Anyone that knows anything about elite sport will know that to get to the international apex involves the most incredibly discipline, suffering and disappointments over many, many years. And yes, whole teams of support staff are required to make it happen. And yes, family and friends are an essential component. To ask us to choose between one and the other is facile in the extreme. What it actually achieves is to reduce great human endeavour to the trivial and banal. Who has the best smile, who has the cheeky one liners, who can play the media game the best.

To suggest that Wiggins has made a greater or lesser achievement than Ennis, Farah or Murray is simply absurd. Or that Wiggins has a better personality than the other contenders is doubly absurd. All are truly great athletes. All have overcome great pain and human barriers. All have giant personalities that have driven them forward. Don’t ask the general public to vote, X Factor style, for one over the other, because it is demeaning to all of them. By all means celebrate their achievements but do it in a respectful and considered manner. Less of the glitz and more cerebral content – not something that the BBC specialises in these days.