Delayed reaction

I’ve felt absolutely exhausted today. I think the Late Night SuperBowl Stay-Up has caught up with me. I wouldn’t care if we’d won the pissing thing, but as I may have mentioned briefly on Monday, we didn’t.

Sorry to bore non-Gridiron fans, but here’s a couple of other random observations from Sunday night’s extravaganza:

A few times, they cut to the crowd to show Jay-Z and Beyonce sitting together in one of the posh boxes. Every time they did, Jay-Z was ploughing his way through a huge pile of chips. (BRITISH chips, I mean, not American ones). I thought, at first, they were just re-using the same clip, but Beyonce changed her glasses at one point, so it was definitely live each time. I only point this out because he was probably the only man on Earth who ate more than I did during the game.

I found the half-time show a bit disappointing. Different people have different tastes, but to me it was too glitzy and not musical enough. All that dancing and sparkling costumes. It was like watching EuroVision.

J-Lo and Shakira looked great, and moved well, but I’m not convinced that Shakira was singing live, and I wish they’d picked two or three songs each and done them well, rather than churning out 20-second chunks of 20-or-so songs. It was like watching a commercial for their Greatest Hits Collections.

I flitted between the BBC coverage, and Sky Sports. Sky is my go-to channel of choice, but obviously there are ad breaks, so I found myself steering towards BBC1 more and more often as the match progressed. I understand that Sky is a commercial channel and needs to fund itself, but I’d much rather watch Jason Bell explaining the play-action fake, than watch yet another advert for Jet2 Holidays.

One complaint – the BBC obsession with ‘real people involvement’ does detract from the analysis. Why EVERY show they broadcast has to hit a certain number of ‘viewer comments’ is beyond me. I’d rather hear Josh Thomas talk about the emotions you get when you run onto the field at a SuperBowl, than hear what Phil the Cabbie from Wigan thinks about Osi Umenyiora’s jacket.

But to end on a positive note – Mark Chapman, the BBC host, is absolutely excellent.

RC 5-2-20