Sorry, wrong winner. And I’m not just being tiresomely contrary here. What do long seasons of phone-voting on Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor teach us if not that we must “go by the performance on the night”? And by that reliable standard, it doesn’t matter that Joe Calzaghe has stood astride the sport of boxing for a decade. The shoo-in for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award was James Toseland.

The World Superbikes champion gave it everything in Birmingham. He was the only shortlisted competitor to enter the auditorium on a motorbike, easing his machine down a long ramp into the celebrity enclosure, revving it wildly all the way. You reckon that looks easy, but think of the pressure. One slip of the clutch and he would have run over Henry Cooper.

The biker then sat down at the piano and crashed out a swinging blues in C with the BBC orchestra. Toseland on keyboards? Talk about throwing down the gauntlet. Come in Andy Murray on vibes. And on my left, Christine Ohuruogu on sousaphone. Wowee, Christine.

Great stuff from Toseland, though. Ask any of the competitors on The X Factor why they should be the winner and the answer is always the same: because they want it; they really, really want it. They want it so much. We’ve no idea how much they want it, etc. That’s what it takes to deserve the big phone-voted television prizes in 2007 - sheer wanting it.

And that’s why the Personality award should have gone to Toseland. He was the only one who looked as if he really wanted it. OK, Lewis Hamilton looked as if he quite wanted it. He looked eager for it, in a puppyish kind of way. But was he prepared to risk running over Henry Cooper to get it? No. Did he bring his clarinet with him and lead the band in a soaring version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? No. There’s wanting it, and wanting it properly.

Calzaghe wasn’t even in the building. In the run-up the Welshman had been quotably downbeat about his chances, having “lost to a gymnast and a bloody horse” the previous time. Accordingly, he had taken himself off to Las Vegas for the weekend.

Fortunately, the BBC had Lennox Lewis standing by to hand Calzaghe his prize in the event that hell froze over, which it promptly did. These days Lewis is, pound for pound, the best Stevie Wonder lookalike that British boxing has produced.

Nevertheless, the BBC missed a trick. It should have arranged for Calzaghe to receive the trophy from Toytown, the “bloody horse” he lost out to last time. It would have meant closure.

On a glorious night for pugilism, Lewis also had to present a replica statuette to Ricky Hatton. Having come second in the ring only a few hours earlier, the Manchester boxer now knew the indignity of coming third. Hats off to The Hitman for looking pleased about it because, in boxing, as everyone knows, third really is nowhere.

The night always has to produce a shaming moment, normally involving wheelchair access or a bike-shed joke from Gary Lineker or Sue Barker. This time, though, to national relief, the dodgy gag count was down and the evening brought embarrassment upon itself only when there was no standing ovation for Tim Henman, who led a short parade of retiring stars. Failure to give it up properly for the greatest British tennis player in half a century was a poor show. Most of that audience hadn’t paid a penny for those seats, so I don’t know why they felt so attached to them.

Some critics will have found the continuous references by Sue, Gary and Adrian Chiles to “the 2007 Sports Personality of the Year Event supported by Robinsons” a bit rich, coming from the famously advertising-free BBC – not to say confusing for the shortlisted Jason Robinson, whose family was there, meaning that he, too, was supported by Robinsons, but in a completely different way.

Let’s not forget, though, that, in the sports world, mentioning Robinsons doesn’t count as advertising. It doesn’t count at Wimbledon (where the proud prohibition on vulgar endorsements has somehow never applied to the fruit-juice maker) and nor does it count at the Sports Personality of the Year event. That bright green channel running up the middle of the stage, by the way, was a river of lime juice.

Overall, it was an uncontroversial evening – and vastly moving when Sir Bobby Robson received his Lifetime Achievement award. If only the event wasn’t so smug. When Roger Federer was given the overseas award, much was made of him equalling Muhammad Ali’s record of three overseas titles, for all the world as if the measure of Ali’s greatness (or Federer’s) was in the number of statuettes the BBC had agreed to award him in the course of his career. For some watching, such matters are decided elsewhere, but it’s an increasingly old-fashioned view.