Yesterday I watched the Super Bowl. I wasn’t going to because I don’t actually know what it is, but I was persuaded to give it a go.
I still have no idea what its about.
I thought, perhaps stupidly, that there might be a bowl. A big one… A super big one. Like the kind you serve fruit salad in for your whole family at Thanksgiving. You know? A super bowl. But there wasn’t. No bowls.
Instead they seem to be playing a game with absolutely no rules. A game where, if you are one of the two hundred and fifty thousand players on either team that isn’t actually doing anything, it is completely alright to dive on someone’s head for absolutely no reason. Seriously – why are there so many people on the teams?
It’s just really violent. Fortunately everyone is so wrapped up in padding that they are no longer even human-shaped, but instead look like someone put a t-shirt on a buffalo.
It also took ages. No one warned me that I would be spending three hours of my life watching a game that is only supposed to last an hour. Why is it so long? They spend a fortune on the Super Bowl every year; surely they could find a clock that can go for more than three seconds without stopping? They could make a saving by firing the three year-old who draws random yellow lines on the players during the instant replays, in some kind of code that makes absolutely no sense. At one point, they played a slow-motion clip of a man running down the field and the three year-old followed his progress with the yellow pen… Which is completely unnecessary. I know where he went. A zillion other people and I just watched him run down the field. We don’t need a line to show us how he ran there. We just saw it!
And Peyton Manning! Everyone was so excited about him. There was so much hype and it was all for absolutely nothing. I’m not even sure which one he was. Embarrassing, really.
The guy that I do like is the one whose job it is to kick the ball. The kicker I believe they call him…That man is a genius. Anyone who can persuade people to pay him millions of dollars to wander on to the field and kick something vaguely in the direction of the uprights and who then gets to go and sit back down and eat an orange, is an absolute mastermind.
It is three hours of a one hour game carved up into 1 minute chunks sandwiched between commercials that would be better suited to the cinema than to TV. My favourite was the Jaguar ad with all the British people looking extremely cool. And the Chrysler commercial where Bob Dylan asked the profound question, ‘Is there anything more American than America?’
Umm… no? But is there anything more Tuesday than Tuesdays? Or more hungry than a hungry hippo? No! Of course not. It’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Well, apart from the idea that a horse would care if a puppy that it didn’t really know got adopted, and would stage a rescue attempt with all his horsey friends to save him, just because he liked Budweiser.
And then there was the halftime show. I have seen the half time shows before. I was excited! I saw Madonna when she was dragged across the field on a massive chair. I saw when Beyonce brought on her two new backing dancers – Kelly Rowland and Michelle the-other-one. I even saw when Justin Timberlake lost the battle to his ‘I have to see Janet Jackson’s nipple’ urges. But I didn’t much enjoy Bruno Mars. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers were fun – I liked them, although they could have done with some more clothes. They’re getting a bit older now and it can get jolly chilly in New Jersey. I wouldn’t want them catching anything. Bruno was just a bit tame really. Sure, he spent a bit of time playing drums on a mysteriously floating platform, but haven’t we all. That’s so old hat. Even The Rolling Stones have done that.
So I think I am done with the Super Bowl now. People keep telling me that this was not a good Super Bowl and that I should try again next year, but sometimes you only need one bad experience to put you off. Like when you go parachuting but it turns out that your backpack was full of sandwiches and not parachute. You know?
