Gutted for Mark Butcher. The Surrey cricket captain was just one duet away from his first major light entertainment crown, only to see karaoke glory on Just The Two Of Us snatched away from him by the public phone vote. In a cruel winter altogether for English cricket, this was surely the darkest night of them all.

Expect the post mortems to be long and furious, and to focus unsparingly on the coaching role of Sarah Brightman, the first professional in living memory to be handed a cricketer in a pro-celebrity challenge show and to fail to deliver a title at the end of it. Such an outcome seemed unthinkable in the Tufnell/Ramprakash/Gough era. Talk about squandering the promise of a golden generation. The words Sven, Göran and Eriksson come to mind.

The inquest will also need to get to the bottom of whoever it was who, before a lightly swung, finals-night rendition of Moon River, issued Butch with the fatal instruction to sing scat. “Beep-a-dot n’doody,” indeed. Yes, it was only a couple of bars, but you can get shot for committing scat in 2007 and Butch can perhaps consider himself lucky, in the circumstances, that he was merely evicted rather than painfully beaten with sticks by an anguished audience and suspended from the studio’s gantry.

There was further controversy when Hannah Waterman, the eventual winner, alerted viewers to her intention to wear a low-cut dress for her final number, in the event that the public voted her through. Analysts agree that this almost certainly precipitated a decisive swing in the actress’s direction among undecided voters. Butcher, who could hardly have been expected to fight fire with fire in this area, simply had no answer.

Clamour to see the cricketer’s cleavage was minimal going into the series, and stayed at that level fairly consistently throughout, so as soon as Waterman played the chest card, the contest was no longer taking place on a level playing field. It’s bound to rankle, and although Waterman could fairly claim to be merely using “everything available”, it’s an area that, for the sake of the competition’s integrity, the administrators would now do well to take a long look at.

Still, when all is said and done, there were consolations a-plenty for Butcher. He earned a new nickname from Brightman (“the Big Bear”) and how many county cricketers can say the same? What’s more, on finals night, Tito Jackson, one of the contest’s judges, brought glad tidings from Michael, his controversy-inundated brother. “In his book, every one of you are winners,” Tito explained.

Obviously, it would have been nice to hear more specifically where Michael ranked the batsman’s chances against Marti Pellow, among others, but you can’t have everything, and if you had told Butcher at the beginning of the domestic season that, come January, he would be receiving the best, if diplomatically vague, wishes of the King of Pop, he would have taken that, I think.

And even though he finished third, no one was doubting Butch’s potential. Tito was insistent. “Mark, change careers. Become a performer.” That said, Tito also suggested that the dancer Brendan Cole’s version of Brown Sugar was better than Mick Jagger’s, at which point the show’s connection with events in the real world — tenuous at the best of times — seemed to slacken to the point where it became irrecoverable.

Still, Brightman, too, spied a future in the business for Butch. “He’s got it all if he wants to make singing his profession.” Well, do you, Butch? My tip: lose the girl. Does that sound ruthless? Well, it’s a ruthless business.

Further bravery against the odds at the BDO World Darts Championship at the Lakeside, where Davy “The Face” Richardson went into his first-round match with two cracked ribs, suffered falling over while trying to put on his trousers. That, as Ray Stubbs of the BBC quite rightly pointed out, is “not something you normally hear in sport”. Nor in many other places, really.

And lest you infer from the darting context that “The Face” must be some kind of unhelpfully cumbersome beer monster, let me underline that, even with his trousers safely in place, the unseeded Englishman is only marginally thicker than a stick of celery. Maybe that was his problem, in fact. In any trouser-related tumble, the ribs on the larger kind of darter would have been less exposed. These are the kinds of upsets that your typical player bounces straight back from.

Anyway, blessedly, Richardson managed to get to the oche without further injury, and then spurred himself through the pain barrier to secure a 3-1 victory over Vincent van der Voort, a player described by Bobby “The King of Bling” George as “very spasmotic”. Well put.

“People say darts isn’t a physical game,” cautioned “The King of Bling”, reflecting on Richardson’s feat. “But it is.” Too right. It may even be, from a reckless self-endangerment point of view, more risky than putting on a pair of trousers. Consider yourself warned.