Strictly con dancing

John, it's only dancing. You knew that, but didn't you do well to turn your incompetent tango into a fabulous new fame? Didn't you make the voters feel good, for seeming to stick up two fingers at those who presume to tell us what to think? Didn't people howl when you resigned from Strictly Come Dancing (not realising it showed a sense of timing finer than anything you'd done to music)? Don't we all love you now? But haven't we all, actually, been taken Strictly for mugs?

The saga of John Sergeant and the BBC's Saturday flagship television show has been almost universally told as an audience uprising. The producers were shocked, we were told, when people voted to keep the clumsy former political correspondent in the contest and throw out people who could actually dance. The judges were outraged at being overruled, apparently. Viva La Viewer Revolution. But it's not really like that at all. Instead, the audience has been expertly manipulated by the BBC and Sergeant himself.

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It's easy to see why he appealed to people. Strictly is a pompous show, in love with its own reflection in the mirrorball. The judges take the dancing and themselves far too seriously. The former competitor Gabby Logan has described being sucked into an atmosphere "like joining a warm, cosy cult whose uniform is sequins and whose mantra is Sinatra". Sergeant wasn't sucked in. He sat and read the paper while others trained. He drank a lot of tea. Then he pulled a penguin suit over his portly frame, strutted out with his Marilynesque professional partner Kristina and danced with a look on his face that said, "This is all completely ridiculous".

Did he do this by accident? No. First, he was hired to play a part. The competitors get £25,000 for the 12-week run (the professional dancers slightly more). Every season, Strictly has someone who's a bit rubbish at dancing, nowhere near as fit as the rest, but willing to try his best for a few weeks before foxtrotting off early with a cheque. The underdog. We're supposed to love them, a feeling exploited ruthlessly by all reality shows.

Second, John Sergeant was no innocent. Despite being the son of a missionary, he was also a war reporter before becoming a politico. His fame was assured in 1990 on the steps of the British embassy in Paris, when he told 13 million viewers that Mrs Thatcher was not coming out. "She's behind you, John," said Peter Sissons in the studio. And she was, grabbing his microphone and declaring her intention to fight on for the leadership of her party. The moment was farce, great television, and the scoop of his life. That mattered to Sergeant, a fierce competitor. Michael White, a fellow political journalist, describes him as good for a laugh but with a reputation for treading on toes. He is "an uncollegiate colleague with whom it was hard to tango".

John Humphrys, once a senior colleague at the BBC, says: "He has that enviable skill of being able to slip a dagger between the ribs of a competitor with a smile and charm that leave his victim almost unaware that the dagger has penetrated."

Both men recall what happened after Robin Oakley was hired over Sergeant's head as BBC political editor. Oakley dried up on air. "Don't worry, old boy," said Sergeant. "We've all nearly done that." As Humphrys says, "the placing of the 'nearly' in that sentence was masterful".

So was Sergeant's manipulation of his position on Strictly. When it began, the best the retired 64-year-old could hope for was to raise his profile – and earning potential – playing a hangdog guy with a cute line in self-deprecation. If he couldn't be a winner, he could be a world-class gallant loser. It worked, way beyond his dreams. Why? Because the credit crunch has made us bolshy. We don't like people who are too big for their boots, like the judges on reality shows. But more, much more than that, the audience revolted because it was supposed to. That's how these things are set up – it's just that it has never worked this well before.

There was a hint of it the previous week, over on ITV, when X Factor viewers voted to keep the widower Daniel – basically a pub singer with a tear-jerking back story – instead of the much more talented Laura White. Simon Cowell, the original nasty judge, was outraged. At least he said he was. A confrontation between viewers and judges was the natural next step for a format beginning to look tired. The phone vote the following week was massive.

Without controversy, these are simple shows: X Factor is a holiday-camp talent contest; Strictly Come Dancing a hoofer's display that was dropped years ago because people were bored. The difference now is not the celebrities, it's the judges. That is why they are paid £90,000 a series on Strictly, more than three times what the dancers get for doing all the work. The Strictly judges have followed Cowell's pantomime lead with a passion this season, laughing at Sergeant, sneering, calling him more ha-ha-ha than cha-cha-cha. (But not a dancing pig in Cuban heels, as the BBC has taken pains to remind us. That was a newspaper columnist.) Of course, the public said: "Hey, bullies, leave our John alone." The only real shock is that the pantomime was played so well – the evil judges were so evil, the winsome loser so winsome – that Sergeant stayed in.

Unable to back down, the judges raised the stakes. "Insiders" told the tabloids that the chief judge, Len Goodman, thought the public was "making a mockery of the competition". He had to say that, he's a respected dance professional. Moreover, although Strictly has always been about entertainment first (or it wouldn't employ a clodhopper like Sergeant) the BBC is not really allowed to produce trashy, ratings-grabbing reality shows like other channels – so the cover of it being all about the dancing is vital.

Sergeant, a former BBC man, knew he couldn't beat that. So in an absurdly overblown press conference on Wednesday he said he quit after "it became increasingly obvious I may have won the competition because there was no other viable Stop Sergeant candidate". Nonsense. The self-deprecation reads differently, too, if you believe reports that other dancers resented his lack of effort and said "his popularity made him smug".

Sergeant, the political expert, also knew how fast a joke can sour and the mood of a crowd change. Max Clifford, PR guru, says his timing was exactly right. "If he had gone on for another few weeks that popularity could have turned on him."

Oh yes, and he was also booked on a cruise. Sergeant boards a P&O ship this week, having been hired as a speaker. He denies that this trip had anything to do with his resignation, but if he had stayed in the competition last night then left a few days before the cruise, the link would have seemed undeniable. Was he bullied? Is he a quitter? No, he played it perfectly.

The BBC capitalised on the situation, discussing Sergeant on every platform last week. The announcement that Jonathan Ross would not be sacked was almost overshadowed. Instead the Beeb placed itself at the centre of a huge, harmless story that sent ratings soaring for Sergeant's final appearance on Strictly last night.

The plucky "dancing pig" emerges as a winner then, his public appearance fees having trebled at least, from about £5,000 to £15,000. And after all the phone-rigging controversies of the recent past, people feel they have had a proper say. But the truth, as the tango band strikes up again, is that we, the public, have been played like a violin.