The hull of the ship they’re not actually going to call Boaty McBoatface is complete. By the time you read this, it will probably have already slid into the River Mersey, bobbed along massively for a bit and then been tugged off into a harbour. It won’t be the first time that’s happened.

It’s going to be called the RRS Sir David Attenborough instead of Boaty McBoatface, despite the fact that Boaty McBoatface won an online poll to decide its name. I think we can all agree, though, that RRS Sir David Attenborough is a much more sensible name. Then again, to put the contrary point of view, RRS Sir David Attenborough is a much more sensible name.

We can’t know why all the people who voted for Boaty McBoatface did so, but it’s a reasonable guess that very few of them thought it was a sensible name. It’s a silly name, a funny name. They voted for it because they wanted this big sensible expensive boat to be called something daft and trivialising.

Perhaps some of them thought it should have a funny name because they believe that, in general, more things should have funny names – that it would add to the gaiety of nations, to the sum of human happiness, if London was called Big-Botty-Town or the UN was renamed the U-Smell-Of-Poo. And perhaps some of them thought it should have a funny name to take those self-important polar scientists down a peg or two: they needn’t think they’re all that as they take all their measurements in the freezing cold, because they live and work in a thing called Boaty McBoatface! Idiots!

I genuinely think it’s a very funny name – I’ve thought about it many times and it continues to amuse me. Not because it sounds inherently hilarious, like a fart or a burp or a well-timed honk, but because it seems to come from such a dismissive and flippant point of view. “Who cares what the sodding boat is called?” it proclaims. It’s so disdainful of the patronising condescension that the whole notion of asking the public what a boat should be called, as if they’re children and it’s a Blue Peter hamster, absolutely reeks of.

It’s a sign, incidentally, of Sir David Attenborough’s colossal, ocean-going credibility that his name was the one chosen to supplant such a good joke. Jo Johnson, the then minister for universities and science who overruled the Boaty McBoatface vote, must have instinctively sensed that people would go along with it being named after Attenborough. Nobody resents Attenborough. Anyone would feel churlish objecting to its being named after him.

In other humourless name-changing news, I learned last week that the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, just round the corner from where I lived for 10 years, has been renamed the Kiln theatre. This sounds like Prince Charles saying “the Kilburn theatre”. Perhaps they’re hoping he’ll come and cut the ribbon when it reopens after its £7m refurbishment this autumn – make the whole place feel a bit more royal and posh. It would be a surprising change of direction for an edgy off-West-End arts venue, but then The Crown has been huge for Netflix and that whole postwar meritocracy drive seems to have pretty much petered out, so perhaps we’d all better get back to social climbing.

On reflection, I don’t think it’s meant to sound posh. The theatre’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, explained that “we felt the name reflected our home in Kilburn. And a kiln is also a space for transformation, so we felt it fitted in with our ideas of what we should be all about.” A kiln is a space for a pretty predictable sort of transformation – not the sort you’d want to sit and watch. More akin to paint drying than a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but I accept that the word shares four of the seven letters of its location’s name, and maybe that’s good.

You can probably tell that I’m not 100% supportive of this rebranding. Partly I feel possessive of the place because I used to live nearby. Admittedly, I never actually went to the theatre part of it, but I saw Quantum of Solace in its cinema so you can’t say I haven’t suffered in its interests. But mainly I can’t see the point in the change. It will have cost money and has merely turned a theatre that quite a few people had heard of into one that virtually no one has.

I’m not the only naysayer. Rubasingham’s direct predecessor, Nicolas Kent, who ran the Tricycle from 1984 to 2012, described the decision as “tragic” and “a commercial misstep”. There’s also a protest group calling for it to be reversed and an online petition signed by over 1,400 people.

I haven’t signed the petition. I don’t like the decision – I can’t see any reason for it other than a self-important instinct to tamper with things – but it’s not up to me or to any random online signatories. The naming of theatres is not a democratic process but the decision of the people running them. It’s a tiny part of the venue’s artistic offering, a creative choice. The rest of us can slag it off, just like we can slag off any shows we didn’t enjoy, but we cross a line when we dispute their right to make it. If you want to decide what a theatre is called, get yourself a job running a theatre. A few thousand votes from people who don’t know what they’re talking about are no reason to change course.

As the Boaty McBoatface saga shows, you can’t always bow to a snapshot of popular opinion. Who knows why people voted as they did, in what spirit of lashing out against the establishment, of tweaking the nose of the ruling class, without having fully thought through, or been properly informed of, the long-term implications. Sometimes someone has to step in to stop something crazy happening – something terrible that does lasting damage. But only if it’s a really important issue, like a boat being given a silly name.