What can't be questioned is that Abts was the most accessible of the finalists, a fact that makes her a suitable winner this year. The prize needs the oxygen of publicity and while it has claimed the almost unique achievement of making art an annual water cooler discussion topic, there was a feeling that a connection had to be reestablished with the public.

Working exclusively on canvases measuring 48cm x 38cm, her paintings seem somehow to adhere to geometric rules, looking at how futuristic art would be depicted in a Hollywood film, but her use of texture and inventive colours give them a human warmth.

To say this compares favourably to the other finalists is an understatement.

Mark Titchner's multi-media installation comes with an epilepsy warning, although this should not be confused with the fact it could also induce a migraine.

While art doesn't have to be either beautiful or easy to understand, 'How To Change Behaviour' seems to be deliberately neither, wilfully obscure with hints towards answers you suspect the artist himself doesn't possess.

Rebecca Warren's clay sculptures have always taken a delight in being ostentatiously ugly, but were her efforts here music they'd be tuneless dirges, lacking in any shape or coherence, the type of art that you need to be told is art.

Far more impressive was photographer and video artist Phil Collins's 'The Return of the Real', featuring interviews with people who claim to have had their lives ruined by their experiences on reality TV shows.

Within the show room Collins also built a fully-functioning nineto-five, Monday-Friday office housing his own production company, thus saying all manner of clever things about layers of voyeurism and the observer's role within them. Moreover, the notion of people working in an office being art sounds like exactly the kind of oddity that would usually appeal to the Turner judges.

But Abts deservedly got the nod, thus becoming the first woman and, more pertinently, the first painter to win the award in almost a decade, as the Turner Prize grounds itself briefly, no doubt ahead of spinning off in some new direction next year. So no flickering lights, elephant dung or unmade beds, with the main talking point being that, for once, there wasn't one.