American Football

A great comedy about a terrible sport

I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and portcullised helmets shout numbers, bash into one another, then wait half an hour while the referee decides whether or not they’re allowed to throw a spinny ball and maybe one day end up being Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend. So you’ll never guess what the subject is of my favourite new American comedy series, Chad Powers…

To win, the Tories should be the party of motorists

The path to electoral success at the next election is straightforward. Just follow what I call the Channel 5 strategy. Channel 5 is a rare success story in the world of free-to-air broadcasting, a feat attained by following a simple playbook: making programmes the public likes to watch, but which people working in television are mostly too precious to make. Channel 4 got there first. By broadcasting American football, it found a sport which was far more popular with the public than most ‘people in television’ realised. Every NFL game played in London since 2007 saw sold-out crowds at Twickenham or Wembley; when the Pittsburgh Steelers made an appearance in

Emperor Trump and the spectacle of the Super Bowl

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic law-maker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: ‘Fly me to New Orleans.’ Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays

My night with the worst kind of nostalgia 

American Football are a band whose legend was formed by the internet: some Illinois college kids who made an album for a little label in 1999, went their separate ways, and in their absence found that a huge number of people had responded to their music. They duly reunited in 2014. They are often identified as emo, the most confounding of all genre names, given it means everything and nothing, but American Football are not of the eyeliner and dyed-hair variety exemplified by My Chemical Romance, nor the angsty pop-punk variant of Weezer or Jimmy Eat World, nor the shouty hardcore punk evolution of the genre’s founders in the 1980s.