If the late Andy Williams is to be believed, then Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. Either that, or the most frenzied.

If you’re not being trampled into the ground by a stampede of manic, boggle-eyed shoppers looking for that final “wee thingy” for Auntie Doreen, then your ear drums are being bludgeoned to smithereens by a marauding battalion from an office party whose shrieking method of communication sounds more like a conversation between half-a-dozen angle grinders.

All of this, however, is marginally less of an assault on the senses than the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year bonanza, a gaudy, strobe-light flashing, thumping music extravaganza that has about as much elegance as a salvo from an artillery battery.

The sycophantic championing of the England football team which didn’t win the World Cup, meanwhile, was so jarringly jingoistic, it was broadly equivalent to watching Jacob Rees Mogg cheerily handing out traybakes at a Brexit-themed street party.

If there’s one thing that SPOTY is guaranteed to produce on a yearly basis, then it’s a welter of harrumphing, fist-shaking from those of a golfing persuasion. Snubs here, lack of recognition there, shrugging indifference everywhere?

Of course, we’ve been used to golfers being overlooked in this lavish shindig down the years. Only Dai Rees in 1957 and Nick Faldo in 1989 have been presented with that ornate camera on a plinth in the programme’s 64-year history. It was no surprise, therefore, that Georgia Hall’s omission from the final shortlist compiled by a panel of “former athletes and industry experts” led to a disgruntled outpouring from those in and around this Royal & Ancient game.

Disgrace, scandal, outrage, complete affront to human dignity? You name it, plenty flung their tuppence worth into the pot as the achievements of this year’s Women’s British Open champion were relegated to the kind of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, throwaway snippet which looked like it had been hastily salvaged from the cutting-room floor by the Beeb’s janitor.

In the grand scheme of her sporting life, Hall, the 22-year-old who became the youngest British female to win a major title, won’t be too bothered about missing out on a SPOTY nod when careers are defined by much more meaningful prizes. There was still a sense of sighing futility, though.

As an inspiring figure, Hall stands out. There was no silver spoon treatment for this daughter of a plasterer who readily admits that she had to forego a number of playing opportunities in her formative years because she simply couldn’t afford to take them up. The lazy assumption is that golf is a stuffy pursuit and a haven for the rich while the reality, in most cases in the UK, is altogether different.

Lewis Hamilton, the Formula One world champion, was on the SPOTY shortlist again. But if golf is viewed as a sport for the haves of society, goodness knows what that makes the vast, cash-soaked world of Grand Prix racing? People of any age, ability or background can’t simply nip outside and take up F1 on a whim like you can, by and large, with golf.

At a time when women’s sport is garnering unprecedented levels of publicity – and there is still plenty of work to do on that front – golf seems to have missed the tail wind that is gusting behind the female cause. That the England’s women’s netball squad which won gold at the Commonwealth Games picked up the Team of the Year prize as well as Sporting Moment of the Year underlined how golf has, in many ways, slithered out of the public consciousness.

Had Hall been a major-winning British female tennis player, meanwhile, then the reaction to her success would undoubtedly have been spectacularly different. Let’s face it, the likes of Johanna Konta or Heather Watson merely have to take a swig of Robinson’s Fruit & Barley squash between sets and the media coos itself hoarse.

But perhaps we should just calm down. In Italy’s SPOTY equivalent recently, Open champion, Ryder Cup hero and European No.1, Francesco Molinari, lost out on the Sportsman of the Year award to a sprinter.

It’s a fickle old world ...