As I type, BBC Radio Five Live are warming up for their coverage of tonight’s Superbowl, with all the mock enthusiasm of a Presbyterian grandmother at a gay wedding. Hearing “so tell me, which two teams are playing?” in the introduction only makes me more convinced about how little they or their audience know or care about the event.
Incidentally, the marketing men claim that over a million people in the UK watch the Superbowl, a figure which must be horseshit, not just because of American football’s minority status in this country; thanks to the time difference it’s shown late Sunday night/Monday morning and (up until this year at least) there would be no pubs open to show it. Where do they get these figures from?
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February 5th, 2006 at 22:36:30
I quite like their coverage. I think Rhod Sharp’s rather more like a benevolent missionary, becoming unexpectedly enthusiastic about some bizarre initiation ritual somewhere in the Amazon basin… “And why is he doing that with the eel? Really? Well, I can’t say I quite understand, but I must admit it is all rather jolly…”
February 5th, 2006 at 23:11:27
Superbowl schmuperbowl. Last year it was quite amusing here in Boston (in a riot, rape and pillage kind of way) since the local boys were playing and, of course, won. This, year, however, has so far only been marked by the scarcity of chicken wings and beer in the shops and the totally deserted streets. Oh bugger, I think I might just go to my local bar and watched the blasted thing (purely out of anthropological interest, you understand). Harrumph.
February 5th, 2006 at 23:40:42
Ah, the Superbowl. Rugby Union with helmets, huge stadiums, people who feel the need to interchange “offense” and “defence”, and freakish amounts of white paint on the pitch. I can imagine the half-time food’s better than at, well, Plymouth Argyle (does American football even have half-times?), though.
February 6th, 2006 at 09:37:18
As my housemate puts it, turn-based rugby. Beng a geek I found that hilarious.
Speaking of housemates, some of them stayed up last night to watch it apparently. Really can’t see the appeal of it myself. I just find most American sports so dull. There’s either no real build-up play whatsoever between scoring (basketball, ice hockey), or it’s artifically forced in and slows the game completely down (their football).
Give me a flowing game of football, tennis or rugby any day.
February 6th, 2006 at 14:22:45
It’s not Turn-Based Rugby.
It’s Violent Chess.
February 6th, 2006 at 15:12:21
No… this is violent chess.
February 6th, 2006 at 16:47:19
Not sure I understand your point about there being “no pubs open to show [the Superbowl].” The game was being shown on terrestrial TV (five) as well as Sky Sports, so surely there’s no obstacle to watching this at home, with the added benefit that no-one need know that you’re a fan of weird sports!
Generaly speaking, though, I do wonder about the announcements that “X million people watched event Y”, as they frequently seem an order of magnitude of what one might reasonably expect.
February 6th, 2006 at 19:04:19
I know that sometimes sport ratings are counted in a completely misleading way. I know that Formula 1 figures often run into several billion, because they count each person who’s watched a programme that had F1 in it. So perhaps if you’ve watched today’s news, that counts towards the Superbowl’s viewing figures.
Having said that, I believe that it isn’t actually all that unusual for a late-night television programme to get 1m viewers, and it’s not difficult to see why the Superbowl would collect quite a lot of viewers, even if it’s just out of curiosity.
February 6th, 2006 at 19:44:09
Nick - the pub thing is because accurate figures from people watching in pubs can only ever really be estimated very roughly, and more often than not these estimates can be quite generous (e.g. assuming everyone in the pub is watching the match, whether they are or not). Plus there is a bit of a difference between deliberately choosing to watch a match at home, and drifting into the pub and casually catching whatever’s on the TV there.
I can kinda get doctorvee’s point that someone might tune in for a few minutes out of curiosity - but the Superbowl goes on for hours, and on the night before the start of the working week, I’d be staggered if that many actually watched the match all the way through.
February 7th, 2006 at 14:44:52
Jawbox - there is a half time, which is filled with obscenely expensive adverts (possibly the most exciting thing about the whole sorry affair) and a show where you might get to see Janet Jackson’s nipple or, this year, Mick Jagger making a fool of himself. Other than that the entire game is structured around advertising breaks.
February 7th, 2006 at 16:05:33
This report on the MediaGuardian site says the Superbowl got 700,000 viewers. I presume, as with most ratings figures, this is the average figure across the entire programme.
February 7th, 2006 at 23:32:40
One of my mates struggled into college on Monday morning looking like a manic depressive vampire with insomnia to boot - he’d been up till 3AM watching it. The only thing he seemed to remember about it was that Jagger made a twat of himself.
February 9th, 2006 at 19:05:11
Yay! Superbowl… by chance a work trip to Orlando saw me with a spare Sunday at the Universal Studios theme parks. Being Superbowl day it was empty, so I never waited more than 10 minutes to get on the front seat of any rides. So if more people want to go watch TV when I’m at the theme park, then I’m all for…