When a 22-year-old Michael Owen won the Ballon d’Or, the highest individual accolade in world football, in 2001, he was one of Britain’s most famous faces. Still slight of frame and boyish of face, the public watched as he moved from Liverpool to Real Madrid, precipitating the slow, tempered decline of his career. Gradually, his celebrity was superseded by contemporaries like Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard. Now a new Amazon documentary series, Meet the Owens, takes us deep into the banal afterlife of the former England striker.
“You are David Brent,” Michael’s wife, Louise, observes as her husband larks around their Flintshire home. They live with their four children: Love Island star Gemma, daughters Emily and Jessica, and a son, James, who has a degenerative sight condition. But aside from scenes of domestic harmony (there is a three-minute sequence showing Michael and his sprogs decorating a Christmas tree), the main focus of Meet the Owens is on Manor House, a Cheshire stables owned by the family. “It’s a way of life, it’s not a job,” Michael remarks, and much of the show’s drama revolves around his quest for winners at various races. The whole family buys into this: Jessica is an aspiring showjumper, while Gemma gamely signs up to be a jockey at a women’s only charity race at Goodwood.
Who on earth is this show for? Michael Owen is most famous as a footballer, yet the show is very light on reflections on his playing days or involvement in the modern game. Cameos from the likes of Rooney and Jamie Carragher feel like non-sequiturs. He confesses that his career as a matchday co-commentator was scuppered by his inability to pretend to care about matches like West Ham v Burnley, yet his enthusiasm for horseracing shines through. There is a world, then, where Meet the Owens deploys the Clarkson’s Farm template for equestrianism, yet the access behind the scenes at the stables is limited. We see Michael drop a quarter of a million pounds on new horses at an auction. “Let’s just hang off on that new kitchen you wanted,” he tells his wife. This is the sort of confusing conflation of personal and business expenses that Clarkson’s Farm skilfully navigated.
And then there’s the presence of Gemma (“a female version of me,” according to her dad) who entered the Love Island villa as a 19-year-old, finished as runner-up and has gone on to amass 1.6 million Instagram followers (her father only has 513k, to his shame). Perhaps Amazon is hoping that she will be able to convert some of that audience to this show. Young women searching for the glamour of House Kardashian, mixed with a bit of Northern charm and point-to-point plumminess. If those viewers do give Meet the Owens a chance, they might find themselves somewhat alarmed by how much of the action is given over to her dad, a self-described “boring prick”.
And therein lies the true madness of Meet the Owens. Neither Michael nor Gemma is natural onscreen (“I’m pretty monotone as well,” she confides to her dad). This is a man who doesn’t listen to music and claims to have only watched eight movies in his life; “after half an hour, 40 minutes I can’t take it any longer,” he said in 2014. It contrasts with a show like At Home With the Furys, which is also fairly rubbish but is propelled by Tyson Fury’s natural charisma. The Vardys, released this summer, was another dismal addition to this canon, but, again, there is an air of chaos that surrounds Jamie and Rebekah Vardy, as it does Wayne and Coleen Rooney, who are getting the same treatment next month. I fully expect The Real Rooneys, as it is being called, to be bad – but I doubt it will be dull. But in Meet the Owens, we see Michael spreading Dairylea on a slice of toast, forcing his kids to turn the lights out in their bedrooms (they also wear gilets indoors most of the time, so their energy costs must be lovely and low), and talking about his “obsession” with orcas. It is so tedious it begins to feel like a joke, albeit one without a punchline.
open image in galleryWill we be taken inside the mind of Michael Owen, an ITV presenter at Chester races is pictured asking, as the documentary crew trails the former footballer. “That’s somewhere you don’t want to go!” Michael responds. It is a rare moment of insight from a man who could be electrifying on the pitch, but in his post-career existence has become every bit as boring as most retired men. Meet the Owens is a confused, pointless addition to a new genre growing by algorithmic topsy. Streamers are trying to create reality TV (for the women!) looking at sports stars (for the men!) and, as a consequence, are making absolute rubbish that ought to satisfy no one who values their own time.