Fresh air for the breather

You are watching the big Super Bowl game on the requisite giant flat-screen TV. You are sitting in the requisite Starship Enterprise recliner with dual cup-holders.

You are gorging on enough food to nauseate even the contestants on The Biggest Loser. Suddenly you hear those magical words: “Up next, the Super Bowl half-time show.''

OK, how do you react? If you are a baby-boomer, you are thinking: “Great, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!''

If you are a Gen-Xer or Gen-Nexter or whatever the young call themselves these days, you roll your eyes, mutter, “Great, another geeze-fest'' and go off to Twitter your friends about how lame the show is.

This, friends, is the vast cultural divide that confronts us with these half-time shows.

Riff and wrinkles

Look, I bow to no one in my veneration of the great Springsteen and his band, whom I have seen in concert many times and consider the best show on the planet.

But would it kill the NFL to book a Super Bowl half-time act that wasn't around when Nixon was impeached?

Would it be so awful to see performers who don't have hip replacements on their credit cards? Performers who (here is a radical concept) young people might like, too?

Instead, the league keeps trotting out these dinosaurs of rock, making the half-time show feel like some sanitised Woodstock for AARP members.

Let us take a look at the half-time performers at the last five Super Bowls, shall we? They are: Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Prince, the Rolling Stones and Sir Paul McCartney.

Some of these acts are so old, they should be embalmed. The Stones have an average age of, what, 117? McCartney is 97.

Bruce is 88. Petty and Prince, well into their seventies, have been seen lining up for the early-bird special at South Florida restaurants for years now.

The NFL is not exactly showing off exciting new talent at these half-time shows, which drives young people from the room like someone sprayed teargas.

Most of the problem, of course, stems from what happened at the half-time show during Super Bowl 38. (Sorry, we're not using those pretentious Roman numerals here. It's a football game, not the reign of a French monarch.)

You remember that night of quality entertainment, of course.
That was the night Justin Timberlake tore off part of Janet Jackson's costume during their performance.

The incident, which was initially blamed on a “wardrobe malfunction'', created a huge uproar.

And to think the half-time entertainment at the first few Super Bowls consisted of marching bands and the gooey performance troupe Up With People. That feels like it was 200 years ago.

Naturally, the Timberlake-Jackson flashing incident was widely decried as a sign of increasing moral decadence and the imminent collapse of civilisation.

David Letterman even joked that president George W. Bush would form a Department of Wardrobe Security to prevent any further depravity.

But the whole thing led the NFL to shy away from young, edgy, half-time acts in favour of a string of “safe'' acts, beginning with the Stones.

Ever think you would live long enough for the Stones to be considered “safe''? Are you kidding? The Stones did more depraved things before breakfast than Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson will do their whole lives.

The point is, how long will the NFL let the wardrobe malfunction incident haunt the Super Bowl half-time show?

Can't the league throw a bone to young viewers and book Lil Wayne or Coldplay or Amy Winehouse, just to mix it up a bit?

Oh, well, being on the cusp of geezerhood myself, I am looking forward to seeing Bruce and the E Streeters do their 12-minute set.

Sure, I will cringe when they bring out the obligatory 2,000 screaming and dancing teens to surround the stage and act like they are rocking out, teens who will probably be thinking: Who are these old guys, anyway?

And if the corporate audience at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, had done some kind of goofy flash-card show in the middle of the Boss's act, that would have been mortifying too.

In future, I will keep watching no matter what.
But I doubt many young people will.