The Vardys review – very bad, very boring and devastating for Wagatha Christie fans
Jamie and Rebekah Vardy’s new reality show will disappoint every single person who tunes in, from football lovers to followers of The Scousetrap. The only possible fun you can have is rolling your eyes at them
If you are tuning in to the new three-part reality show The Vardys you will be disappointed. There’s nothing missing from that sentence. Whatever the reasons or expectations you have for tuning in, you will be disappointed. This is because it is very bad and very boring. That will make every viewer down in the mouth. Those who tune in for more specific reasons – being a fan of Leicester City’s beloved former striker-god Jamie V or wanting to hear Rebekah V’s take on the “Wagatha Christie” libel case she brought against and lost to Coleen Rooney – will be even more let down.
Leicester fans won’t get much of Jamie or any footage they haven’t seen before. And much of what is shown in the first two episodes (the third was not available for review) is to do with the troughs of his early days at the Italian club Cremonese – injury, stress, failing to dazzle in his debut, failing to score many goals thereafter – rather than his glory days at home.
For fans of the 2022 legal case (also known as “The Scousetrap”, for Coleen is Liverpudlian, and “Roodunnit?” because the whole thing played out in private, then on social media and then in court like the neatest mystery novel you ever read), here is pretty much everything Rebekah has to say about the private, public and court verdict that she did exactly what she was claiming Rooney had wrongly accused her of:
“Never, ever, ever will I apologise for something I didn’t do. Hell will freeze over before I do that.
“I’m not going to carry on living in the past. I’m so fucking tired of it,” says Rebekah, on a show almost certainly commissioned because of what happened in the past and in the hope that she would discuss it in great detail.
“I don’t have any negative feelings towards [Coleen] whatsoever. Some people might say: ‘That’s bullshit.’ Whatever. That’s your opinion.” The next show could centre on Rebekah’s psychic abilities! I DID say that! It WAS my opinion!
“I’ve got no idea what [Coleen] thinks of me. I’m not bothered.” If the first part of this is true, I will have to revise my measure of her psychic abilities. If the second is true, I would be surprised because, straight after this, she is asked if she wants to add anything on the subject and replies: “Nah, let’s leave it there. Otherwise it’ll get messy.”
Jamie, in what becomes clear is his traditional manner, has little to add. “All the shit’s made us even stronger,” he says.
And after that? Well, The Vardys is a slow, slow grind through the minutiae of packing up a house and moving a family to Italy once Jamie takes his leave of Leicester City and signs with the then Serie A Cremonese. Watching people move house, try to find school places for five children (the oldest of the Vardys’ six is staying in England), moan about getting visas and finding a house to rent is about as interesting as listening to people describe their dreams. And in neither case does it become more bearable when they are rich. European bureaucracy is European bureaucracy. Filled class spaces are filled class spaces.
The only possible fun you can have is rolling your eyes at the apparent pretence that, if she hadn’t had a show to film, Rebekah would have bothered to look at the seemingly skanky house on the market at €13,000 a month instead of dismissing it the minute she saw a single online picture, or that she was really packing the house up herself alone. Sporting an unblemished white outfit as you purport to take wheelbarrow loads of boxes out to the vans has suspicions rising even among those of us without a Rooneyesque talent for deduction.
We have the traditional strewing of banalities intoned as if they were the lost writings of Socrates (“We’ve always stuck together as a family, through good times and bad times. That’s just the way we are”), and the desperate pretence of drama where there is none. Will Jamie score a goal in this game, in that game? Will Cremonese get relegated? Will they stay in Italy or go? All this and more most viewers will already know. The rest will long since have flipped over to a rerun of one of the Beckham hagiographies, which at least had glamour, the recent Vinnie Jones documentary, which at least had Vinnie Jones in it, or perhaps just taken themselves off for a nap. I recommend any and all of these instead.