As the dust settles on Liverpool's Echo Arena, we're still trying to work out how such a glossy year for sport produced such a dull Sports Personality of the Year show. Hurrah for Chris Hoy, of course, honoured by the public phone vote for securing gold medals in Beijing at the rate of 1.5 per thigh. Turns out the nation loves an indoor cyclist more than a motor racing driver or a swimmer. Who knew?

But the BBC's programme was a proper clunker - cold, slightly fumbling, disconnected. Maybe the scale of the set had something to do with it. Sue Barker and Gary Lineker looked as if they had been miniaturised and pumped into the Perspex bowels of Guinevere, the National Lottery balls machine.

Then there was the ramp. Accused in the past of failing to supply a ramp when a ramp would have been useful, the BBC decided to build the ramp to end all ramps - one so steep that walking down it was next to impossible unless you clung for dear life to the banister (as Rebecca Adlington did) or did an impression of Charlie Chaplin without his cane (Lewis Hamilton). Thus were the nominees sent up by the scenery - a job that's normally left to Lineker.

Cue much slow head-shaking from those who remember the Austerity Sports Reviews - days when the ceremony was staged in a bare attic studio at Television Centre, in which gritty professionals in their funeral suits, with no mind to a future on the pro-celebrity ballroom circuit, would vainly huddle for warmth around a glowing David Coleman.

But then the BBC's annual sports review long ago cycled off up the panto path. If something went wrong with the starting gate at the Grand National, as it did in 1993, the offending piece of machinery had to be hauled into the studio for a wry re-enactment - which always felt odd because wasn't the original wonder of outside broadcasting that it could show you things actually happening?

Except that this (no coincidence) was the era in which the BBC's virtual monopoly on sports broadcasting had begun to crumble, meaning that the sports review increasingly couldn't show us things, except in the form of still photographs or clips humbly subtitled “Pictures from ITV”. Something had to be done, during those days of shrinkage, to keep the programme lively, and if that meant Des Lynam jamming a finger in a cursed Aintree starting contraption, so be it.

In this, an Olympic year, though, the BBC had all the pictures it needed. Yet the urge was still there to model the ceremony as an arena rock show. Presumably the thinking was that the sight of those Lycra-clad heroes on bikes, free-wheeling around Barker and Lineker's plastic tubes, would reinvoke the wonder of the velodrome in summer. It didn't. It resembled a cycling proficiency course taking place in a Tupperware tub.

Similarly, was anything gained for the viewer at home by winching Hamilton's Formula One car in over the audience so that it hung just above the head of Ron Dennis? Apart from not altogether gracious thoughts of wires failing and certain people going home wearing a carbon-fibre overcoat.

One is not suggesting for a moment that the sports review cannot still pack a three-ply Kleenex moment when it needs to. Witness the presentation of the lifetime achievement award to Sir Bobby Charlton - although right here was the proof that you can lower in as many props as you like from the ceiling and get someone working away on a pommel horse in the corner, but nothing kick-starts the tear-ducts like a crowd of old boys standing around in ties.

Nine thousand spectators gamely waved their glow-in-the-dark sticks when instructed, but mostly the night was characterised by the chilly reverberation of voices setting off through the silence in the direction of the arena's far-flung walls. The ice-cold moment when little Jake Humphrey (the Eoghan Quigg of the BBC sports department) was sent into the seats to try to melt Andy Murray's mum nearly had me turning the radiators up.

To cap it all, Heather Small came on at the show's climax and asked us, in song, to think of something we had done that day to make us feel proud. No triumph for the creative team here: Heather has put this question to us so many times on the big sporting occasions that some of us have begun to feel slightly persecuted by it - even to the point of hissing through clenched teeth: “Nothing, Heather. Again. All right?” Perhaps this is why the show fell flat: it couldn't begin to rival the year's sport. Maybe it shouldn't try. Aim lower next time.

Shrink the venue, cut the stunts, book somewhere warm. And back to the old smut from Barker and Lineker. Funny to say, but on a strangely strait-laced night, we kind of missed that.