Carry 'n' Camping

It takes a while while for a sporting event to enter the national consciousness. The early FA Cup finals involving Old Etonians, Old Carthusians and Clapham Rovers attracted crowds in the low thousands. Tennis at Wimbledon also suffered from a slow start as Victorians failed to flock to south-west London to watch William Renshaw play brother Ernest. It is therefore verging on the remarkable that within a decade The World's Strongest Man should have become the must-see event of the new-year period. This year the six heats attracted viewing figures averaging more than five million and the final nearly eight million. That outstrips the audience for last May's FA Cup final by nearly half-a-million viewers.

Superficially this is staggering, for at first glance the sight of over-honed men doing daft things is some way short of beguiling. But give it some time, as the great British public have so clearly done, and it becomes as addictive as steroids. Pulling articulated trucks is the new snooker.

There are perhaps five reasons behind its success. First, it is beautifully scheduled. The heats run from Boxing Day to New Year's Eve and go out during the dead time (5.45-6.15pm) when, up and down the country, a nation internally debates whether a drink will be a help or hindrance. The final (5.50-6.50pm) is as much a part of New Year's Day as a Bloody Mary.

Second, the scheduling would be as nothing if it were not for the format. The creators - more of whom later - of this Frankenstein's monster of a sport have very sensibly borrowed liberally from It's A Knockout and Superstars. The tasks allotted to the 'Big Men' are not dissimilar to those that taxed and confused the Belgians during the golden age of Jeux sans Frontières . Making the final a two-day event, the type and font of the scoreboard and the breathy post-event interviews are all pure Superstars . At a masterstroke, one is transported back to David Vine being MC at Aldershot. If you are going to plagiarise, plagiarise from the best.

Third, there is a serendipitous advantage when it comes to connecting with a wider public provided by the fact that the sport's megastar shares a surname with a venerable BBC quizmaster. How many new fans were attracted to football in the 1990s not by Nick Hornby but by the lame joke that Paul Gascoigne might be in some way related to Bamber? Quite a few - sadly. It is probably not a coincidence, then, that the man who has bestrode the sport like a behemoth, winning the title a vein-popping four times on the bounce (aka The Grand Quad), goes by the name of Magnus ver Magnusson. I love that 'ver'. And congratulations to the Magnussons on having recently knocked out a 3,630-gram baby.

Fourth, there is no faffing around on the issue of drugs. It is the Tour de France without the hypocrisy, athletics without the inexplicable absences from competition.

Fifth, finally, and clinchingly, the whole thing is staged. It took a while for me to see through this pretence, but I'm sure you'll agree that the following evidence is irrefutable. For a start, there is the incontrovertible fact that the programme comes not from BBC Sport but from the BBC Events department. The same clever people responsible for the oddly moving Queen's gig at Buckingham Palace. In a word, professionals.

To this must be added the undeniable assertion that you never see anyone other than the main players handling the props. No one runs out from the extremely sparse audience - more of which later - to try and have a go at pulling an articulated truck if he thinks he's hard enough. Only people under contract are allowed on the set, sorry, playing area. Why? Because my guess is that the lads were not lifting a Stone of Asia weighing x kilos but a block of polystyrene painted battleship grey.

The grand finale, in which five so-called Atlas Stones weighing x+y kilos must be placed on a pedestal, in actuality involves much faux grunting and groaning and the hefting of five giant Maltesers. That's not stone, it's honeycomb.

I can and will go on: the much-mentioned articulated truck clearly has the handbrake off; the 1,000cc motorbikes are made by Dinky not Kawasaki; the outsize tyres fail to convince.

Does this matter? Not a jot. As with World Wrestling Entertainment one should be grateful that people have gone to such great efforts to produce such wonderful scripts. (Among many highlights, the Eastern Europeans' faltering grasp of the English language stands out.) And discover 30 actors, many of whom may have had bit parts in Brookside and all of whom are sufficiently talented to wear a Fat Boy suit and pull off that most subtle of tricks, making the light seem heavy.

Naturally, all of this talent doesn't come cheap, so corners have been cut. The sound effects are more cake tin than 10 tonne. The audience was not only small but appeared uninterested. (You try employing thousands of decent extras between Christmas and New Year without offering double money.) And for all the talk of how hot it was and the picture postcards from Kuala Lumpur, I wouldn't be the faintest bit surprised to learn the whole shebang was filmed in Great Yarmouth. God knows, they need help with their employment statistics.

Once you accept the deception that is being practised it becomes possible to take on board just how accomplished a light comic actor John Inverdale is. In the running gag of the series a 'Big Man' approaches Invers as he stands by a swimming pool casually informing us of the extent of his sweating and - you may have guessed this - lightly prods him in his sweating stomach and sends him tumbling back into the pool. Now, if the prodding were being done by a 30-stone lump this would not present a problem. But when it's being done by an in-between-jobs 10-stone actor it requires no little ability for a rugby player such as John to react as he is scripted to react.

Hats off to John. His performance was peerless. He didn't falter even when confronted by a 'cunning stunt' moment on the autocue. Asked to read, 'And there's the Canadian camp,' as the camera tracked from a distinctly muscly and well-oiled man in a pink singlet to a bloke holding a Canadian flag, whom I'm almost certain I saw working backstage at the Winter Gardens in Great Yarmouth during the Jim Davidson 2002 summer season, Inverdale didn't mix his words.

Lesser performers would have blundered and said, 'And there's the camp Canadian' and introduced a wholly inappropriate homoerotic element to the proceedings. And if there is one thing that can stop this 'fastest-growing sport', it's if it becomes more John Inman than John Inverdale.