Steady on now, don't go nuts

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Ever since Sir Freddie Laker started offering cheap flights to America in 1977, we Brits have soaked up opportunities to be, temporarily, American. The arrival of package holidays to New York, Miami and Orlando at a stroke afforded the chance to live out our dreams in a country we'd only seen on television via Starsky & Hutch, Kojak and, er, The Little House On The Prairie.

Thus we rented motorhomes, we did the fabled motel-and-diner roadtrips, we bought cowboy boots and baseball hats, we eat burgers that were patently different to the greasy fare slapped into a white bun at Wimpy, we hired big cars and we got carjacked within half a mile of the airport. Literally, we lived the dream.

Why we took to all this is quite simple: America was not Britain (and last I checked, still isn't). For starters, it had blue skies and sunshine, which in the late 1970s was a welcome change from the permanently monochrome ceiling of our island. And, then, America offered all manner of foodstuffs with which we could balloon to the size of a small house during our fortnight of queuing for rides at Disneyworld or, for those willing to brave a 12-hour flight to the left coast, Disneyland.

So, in the midst of this empassioned, hands-across-the-ocean celebration of Britain's "special relationship" (and at a time when Maggie and Ronnie were making "Coo-eee!" noises at each other via the disturbingly-named 'hotline') the UK's Channel 4 started screening American Football.

In truth, this bore as much sense as NBC or CBS in America showing live cricket, but in the spirit of Britain apparently holding the hidden desire to be a part of a America (hosting its cruise missiles and F-111 bombers, and replacing tracksuits with hoodies and sweatpants as general daywear), it was a canny ploy by C4. Especially as it enabled them to sell advertising time to American beer brands and manufacturers of "chips" (though we'd still prefer to call them crisps, as we all know that chips come wrapped in newspaper and drowned in an ocean of vinegar, rather than foil-packed goodness).

Gridiron may have its distant roots in rugby (and, to some degree "soccer"), but watching 30 men with ears that look like they've been constructed from Play-Doh by a four-year-old, rolling around in mud for 80 minutes, was a very different beast to what was being offered to Yank-up British home entertainment. We tried desperately to get our heads around teams of people padded up like the cast of Dynasty on steroids, wearing, for goodness' sake, helmets - HELMETS! - and essentially playing a licensed version of British Bulldog, for 30-second spells at a time over four hours.

However, sweetened by the taste of America that Sir Freddie and his successors had given us, and with Channel 4 beaming this bewildering explosion of noise, spine-shattering rutting, and totally OTT commentators making statements longer than the plays they were talking about, we took a typically half-arsed approach to watching it.

We may not have understood the rules, or why games lasted longer than a German opera, or, well, anything at all about it, but we happily bought into the hoopla of it all. We raided Sainsbury's of its Budweiser four-packs (not dissimilar to a six-pack, except that it wasn't one) and emptied small bags of Quavers into repurposed fruit bowls. Then we crammed friends and anyone else prepared to stay up on a school night to watch the game on our ridiculous 20-inch TVs in a loose attempt to recreate the American living room experience of a 60-inch set, family-sized bags of Cheetos and a large plastic tub full of beer cans bathing in ice.

Though it may seem to have lasted longer, British enthusiasm for staying up on a Sunday evening to watch live American football soon wained. Brave efforts to watch a Super Bowl, in particular, usually lasted no more than the first hour, before people zonked out ahead of the anticipated half-time show, only to arise from the stupour with the festival all over, amid much grumbling about 9am meetings later that morning. It really just wasn't 'us'.

You've all heard that hoary old trope "England and America are two countries separated by a common language" that George Bernard Shaw came out with in the 1940s? Well, it's not just language. British actors might be able to do passable American accents (example: most films and TV shows), but American actors can't do British, unless they're Gillian Anderson, whose ability to flick between British and American accents is uncanny. And rare. The truth is, we are two different peoples who happen to share large parts of a common language (for a more extended version of this point, look up Eddie Izzard on YouTube and his explanation of "herb" versus "'erb").

Which is why I was not at all surprised to wake up this morning to find my Facebook and Twitter timelines full of posts about Super Bowl parties, Lady Gaga singing The Star-Spangled Banner and looking like Dave Vanian of The Damned, the Super Bowl half-time show and its idiotically overhyped ads (not to mention what looks like an excruciatingly awful combination of Beyoncé, Bruno Mars and a possibly photobombing Chris Martin) - all exclusively from American friends.

There were pictures of food, pictures of beer, pictures of TV sets with pictures of the Levis Stadium on them, pictures of face-painted children sportingly supporting both the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers (an awful practice now seen at Premier League games with two-club scarves hawked outside grounds), and so on. People had gathered, like Thanksgiving, with their nearest and dearest around them. People I would never have down as sports fans at all were celebrating this most American of holidays - Super Bowl Sunday.

No doubt there were a few Americanophiles in Britain who fixed matchsticks between their eyelids to endure what social media seems to have painted as a dull 24-10 win by the Broncos over the Panthers. But even by my standards of obsessive-compulsive sport viewing (yes, I have willfully marched in to the Old Cock'n'Bull in Santa Monica at 4.45am to watch Chelsea-v-Tottenham while downing a nutrionally questionable combination of Guinness and a full English), there seems to have been nothing offered by last night's extravaganza in California to warrant disrupting my sleep pattern for the week. Or that of my compatriots.

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The Super Bowl - like most American sports, now I think of it - is an exclusively American event. My transatlantic cousins may not have the first clue about the World Cup and its finale (when staged in Pasadena in 2004 locals actually didn't know what was taking place inside the Rose Bowl stadium), but they have a capability of elevating enjoyment and excitement of their own sports to a totally different level of hootin' and hollerin'.

In England, we might have our FA Cup Final traditions: the TV goes on at noon for interviews with comedians we'd forgotten were still alive and didn't know supported one of the finalists; and, at a stretch, the Eurovision Song Contest enables our womenfolk to screech their way through all the awful campness while us chaps pretend not to be watching from behind a newspaper. And while these might be social gatherings, with chilled beverages and snacks, they are rarely in the same league as the American nation's Super Bowl festivities.

For the Cup Final, it being a Saturday afternoon (assuming the latest sponsor hasn't moved to 11am on a Wednesday to suit audiences in China), we will sit there nursing a mug of tea and a KitKat; we will pathetically stand for Myleene Klass warbling through God Save The Queen; we will get emotional about Abide With Me; and then we'll get stuck into abusing the referee for 90 minutes. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we might be joined by a family member with nothing else to do, and if we're extremely lucky, they might not know a thing about football, but they're happy to watch this instead of catching up on EastEnders episodes.

Even communal pub viewing of a game of the FA Cup's magnitude is a fairly restrained affair, but largely because it is primarily patronised by British men who, as we all know, do not talk to each other unless absolutely necessary, and even then it will be to either trade obvious comments about a tackle (Bloke 1: "Should have been a card." Bloke 2: "Yeah."), or to enquire "Same again?".

The bottom line is that, despite media coverage of last night's Super Bowl across the British news media, I am supremely sceptical (or is that "skeptical"?) that many - if any - in the UK care. We have no birthright programming to appreciate it, its significance or its noise. We struggle to understand the nuclear physics depth of its statistics. And when, on a sunstroke-weakened moment we've bought one of those replica "football jerseys" at the airport, we just look utter berks when we finally break them out to watch the big game (Note: as does most American sports "apparel" on anyone from Her Majesty's shores).

We Brits have wanted to be American since the Pilgrims legged it up the Mayflower's gangplank in Plymouth and set sail for, um, Plymouth. But the truth is, we can't be. We look twats in baseball hats, we prefer our beer in pints and there is nothing - not even cheese balls - in our snack inventory to come anywhere close to the mighty Cheeto. Which as good enough a reason as any not to stay up watching a Super Bowl, ever.