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A petition to play a SpongeBob Squarepants Super Bowl has received more than one million signatures.
The petition, published on Change.org , argues that the tune should be played during the sporting event on 3 February, 2019 to honour SpongeBob’s late creator Stephen Hillenburg .
Hillenburg died in November 2018 aged 57, due to cardiopulmonary failure due to ALS.
The song singled out by the petition is Sweet Victory , a power anthem featured in the 2001 episode Band Geeks .
In the episode, SpongeBob delivers a rousing rendition of the track during the Bubble Bowl, a sporting event for which he and his friends have been recruited to perform.
American rock musician David Glen Eisley is the real-life singer of the ballad.
“As a tribute to [Hillenburg]’s legacy, his contributions to a generation of children, and to truly showcase the greatness of this song, we call for Sweet Victory to be performed at the Halftime Show,” reads the petition on Change.org.
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Sky
Best TV of 2018 9) Cunk on Britain How much you enjoyed Philomena Cunk's history of Britain depended on how funny you find Diane Morgan's resting confused face. I find it hilarious. Her interviewees are kind of in on the joke but clearly briefed to take it as seriously as possible. They’ll be mid-flow and she will cock her head and drain all the interest from her face. “What's the most political thing that's ever happened?” she asked Robert Peston, who did his best to answer with a straight face. Co-producer Charlie Brooker's fingerprints are everywhere in the way Morgan's vain, poorly informed, easily distracted Cunk operates within a ruthlessly satirical production, which sends up the tropes and cliches of every dodgy documentary and history programme. She might not be the comic creation we need, but she is the one we deserve right now.
BBC
Best TV of 2018 8) Sally4Ever You either love Julia Davis or think her sick filth ought to be banned. Sally4Ever proved yet again that there is nobody working today – or at least nobody with the same platform – with a blacker sense of humour. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) was already surrounded by monsters: her loser of a boyfriend (Alex MacQueen) and tricky colleagues played by Julian Barratt and Felicity Montagu. Then Emma (Davis herself) arrived, a tornado of sex and bad intentions. Beneath the shagging, drugs, excrement, manipulation and malice were pockets of tenderness, but you had to look pretty hard to see them. Luckily there were also gales of laughter. N.b. If you have yet to see it, please do not watch it with your parents or children on Boxing Day and then write in to complain.
Sky
Best TV of 2018 7) The Little Drummer Girl This was a spiritual successor rather than a sequel to The Night Manager. It was still a Le Carré adaptation on the BBC sprinkled with famous faces, but the differences were as pronounced as the similarities. Park Chan-Wook, the Korean auteur, directed with a high sense of style. Florence Pugh was dazzling as the ingenue actress Charlie, recruited for a dangerous mission across Europe, ably supported by Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon as her spook handlers. Some viewers switched off after the first episodes, which took time to set the scene. They missed out on a vivid, beautifully told thriller.
BBC
Best TV of 2018 6) A Very English Scandal Hugh Grant… can act? That was the first surprise in this smooth, stylish BBC retelling of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. He burst convincingly out of the charming fop mould he has slept in so comfortably for thirty years. What have we been missing all this time? The other shock was remembering how recent it all was. The government is still up to a lot of nonsense, but the days of this kind of cover-up, for these reasons, is surely over. Or is it?
BBC
Best TV of 2018 5) Patrick Melrose Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels have the kind of precisely drawn interiority that makes any kind of adaptation seem doomed to fail. Instead, the Sky Atlantic series brought them convincingly to life. It is not a happy tale. In flashback we saw Patrick's childhood in the shadow of his monstrous father David (Hugo Weaving), and the decades of self-loathing and substance abuse that followed. At the centre of all this was Benedict Cumberbatch, as good as he's ever been. His Patrick could be brilliant, witty, cruel and pitiful, sometimes in the same smack-addled sentence. Weaving, Jennifer Jason Leigh as David's wife Eleanor and Pip Torrens as his ghastly friend Nicholas Pratt all put in memorable performances, too.
Sky
Best TV of 2018 4) Dynasties At an age where most of us are long past doing anything, David Attenborough is still changing our expectations of what a nature documentary can do. Like The Rolling Stones, he has been on his farewell tour since about 1970, but unlike Jagger & Co, the returns are not diminishing. Is he fuelled by anger at the world's response to climate change? Or simply driven by some massive internal dynamo, a soul-quest to improve our ability to relate to penguins? Whatever the motivation, Dynasties was wonderful, telling complex stories of the animal kingdom with beautiful photography.
BBC
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BBC
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Rex Features
Best TV of 2018 1) Succession The ageing patriarch and his scheming children. Not an original concept. Trust, the drama about the last days of Getty family, proved that it was possible for a series built on this premise to have actors, scenery, direction, script, etc etc, and still somehow fall short. Succession, by comparison, felt alive. If US production values and ambition gave it its scale, its heart was dark and British. We can thank Jesse Armstrong, co-creator of Peep Show, and his all-star line-up of British writers, including the Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett. They made the Roy family expats themselves, and you could hear the old aristocratic froideur in every withering put-down. But we cared for them, too. One of the many TV professionals I consulted for this list thought Succession was so much better than everything else this year that the top 10 should just have it listed in bold and then nine blank spaces. I wouldn't go that far but it's certainly at the top.
Alamy Stock Photo
An impressive 1,100,567 people had signed the petition as of Thursday and the number kept rising. Signatories have expressed their admiration for Hillenburg in online comments and said playing the song would be a powerful way to honour his memory.
Stephen Hillenburg poses at an event held at Tokyo International Anime Fair on 23 March, 2006 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images) ((Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images)) While significant, the one million figure represents only a fraction of the audience usually drawn by the Super Bowl.
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