Ken Livingstone had one thing right. “If voting changed anything,” he wrote, “they would abolish it.” The po-faced prigs sitting in judgment on Strictly Come Dancing could not abolish voting, so they did the next best thing. They carped and whined and snivelled like schoolchildren until they got the result they wanted and, in doing so, made a country in recession a slightly more miserable place on a Saturday night. John Sergeant was not very good at dancing, but he was very good at not taking himself, or his two left feet, seriously; and in that he cut right to one of the essences of Britishness.

When David Blaine stood upright on the tiny plinth of a 105ft high pillar in Bryant Park, New York, six years ago, he was treated with awe and admiration, before leaping off after 35 hours. In London a year later he was suspended over the Thames in a Plexiglas case for 44 days, during which time people attempted to chip golf balls into his air holes and dive-bomb his habitat with fast food mounted on model aircraft.

It underlined what makes Britain great. We have an in-built mistrust of people who think they are it. Blaine fits that category. So do some contestants, and certainly the judges, on Strictly Come Dancing. Sergeant never did. He had the demeanour of a man who knew this was all a bit of fun and his role, for once in his professional life, was to entertain, not inform. The rest appear to believe they are engaged in some Reithian mission to bring ballroom dancing to the world. They are not. This is Big Brother for people who think they are too posh to watch Big Brother. It's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! without the bugs. Just because nobody takes their clothes off or is covered in earwigs doesn't make it a Play for Today by Dennis Potter.

The judges, by contrast, are nose- in-the-air elitists, banging on about it being a dance competition, which is why the public sought to undermine them with a vote for Sergeant. It is not a dance competition. The BBC had a dance competition. It was called Come Dancing and went out at around the same time as the milk bottles and the cat because nobody was interested. Niles Crane, brother of the sitcom psychiatrist Frasier, coined the best definition of ballroom dancing while being taught the foxtrot by Daphne. “This is boring, yet difficult,” he said.

Sergeant would no doubt have recognised that appraisal. Arlene Phillips, a judge, and formerly responsible for the tedious bit in the Kenny Everett Television Show as director of the mind-numbing dance troupe Hot Gossip (I was a child of the Seventies and, believe me, Debbie Harry had more sexuality in her belly-button fluff), claimed that he read The Guardian when he should have been practising. Maybe he realised there was a big world out there, which is why he did not get sucked into treating the show as if it contained the meaning of life. Nor did he presume success, as many others do. He had booked a cruise to start in two weeks' time. Get on, have fun, get off. That's the spirit. We need more celebrities like that. Get up, tell a joke, keep it short, sit down. That is what people want at the end of a long day.

This is us. This is how we are. When David Rose, the advertising director of The London Review of Books, started a personal ads section in 1998, he believed it would be a way of bringing together high-minded people of similar literary tastes. Instead, he unearthed a nation in which even the shy, lovelorn poet could not bare their souls without adding a self-deprecating wink. One might say they knew the importance of not being earnest.

“Mature gentleman, 62, aged well, noble grey looks, fit and active, sound mind and unfazed by the fickle demands of modern society. Damn it, I have to pee again.”

“You're a brunette, 6ft, long legs, 25-30, intelligent, articulate and drop-dead gorgeous. I, on the other hand, am 4ft 10, have the looks of Hervé Villechaize* and carry an odour of wheat. No returns and no refunds at box no. 3321.”

Rose published a collection of these minor masterpieces under the title They Call Me Naughty Lola after the lonely heart who relayed this information, before adding, “run-of- the-mill beardy physicist, male, 46.”

Some think Sergeant milked the English love of the underdog. Wrong. Underdogs are a pain in the neck. Millwall got to the FA Cup Final once and ruined it by rolling over to Manchester United, not even putting up a fight. They qualified for Europe and got stuffed there as well. No use to anybody, underdogs.

Sergeant was different, which is why the judges feared him. He was not a plucky loser, but a man with his finger on the pulse. Elsewhere in this newspaper, Gabby Logan recounts her personal experience on Strictly. The public never took to her, perhaps because she had obvious ambitions and the only ones really allowed to be competitive are the jocks from rugby and bluff Yorkshire cricketers such as Darren Gough.

Yet we permit this knowing that by taking ballroom dancing seriously they are entering a world of pain at the bar of every clubhouse in the land. And therein resides a very British concept of karma, too.

* The midget in Fantasy Island (his preferred term for a small person, before the letters start).

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