The deliciously
kitschy British prime-time soap drama that could only be equalled if
OK! magazine were adapted for television by a
bonkbuster novelist. An orgy of
conspicuous consumption and disposable celebrity,
Footballers' Wives became the ironic cult-TV hit of
2002, although missed its original target demographic of the
mass market who bought the magazine in the first place.
The series arrived on
ITV with an impeccable trash-television pedigree, being developed by the duo of
Ann McManus and
Maureen Chadwick who had already proved themselves with several runs of the
pseudo-lesbian women's prison drama
Bad Girls. Their company
Shed Productions also included
Eileen Gallagher and
Brian Park, the man who blazed into a stint in charge of
Coronation Street with a
KGB-like purge of certain longer-standing members of the cast.
The show relates the lives, loves and fashion disasters of the players and staff of
Earls Park FC, a fictional
Premier League club located somewhere in
London, presumably so that the
Essex girl quotient can be kept at a maximum level. Strangely enough, one never seems to see them go into action against any rival more exalted than
Birmingham City - a catch-all 'United' serves as the opponent of their crunch matches - although much of
Footballers' Wives appeal is surely that, unlike
Sky One's soap
Dream Team, it keeps the actual footballing action to a minimum. (Football, of course, is one thing. Footballers in the showers is quite another.)
The big names at Earls Park, or the
Sparks as they're nicknamed, seem to consciously invite viewers to guess their real-life inspirations, a kind of televisual
roman à clef. Their
stereotypically efficient German manager
Stefan Hauser, with stereotypical accent to match, oscillates between
Arsene Wenger and
Sven Goran Eriksson; series one's new Italian signing
Salvatore Biagi comes to sound more like
David Ginola by the minute, and would look no less out of place in Ginola's commercials for
L'Oréal.
The focal point of
Footballers' Wives, however, is undoubtedly on the club's rising star midfielder
Kyle Pascoe and his supremely vacant
glamour model wife
Chardonnay Lane. Nobody who keeps more than half an eye on the celebrity press could have endured the Pascoes' wedding, conducted on matching
thrones, or their
Nativity-meets-Arabian Nights-themed christening of their baby in series two, without the slightest thought of golden couple
David and
Victoria Beckham. (
Posh Spice, admittedly, has never managed to set her
breast enhancements on fire.) Hauser hasn't assaulted Kyle with pieces of stray football kit quite yet, but a third series is never far away.
Real-life analogues stop short - to the best of our knowledge, anyway - with the show's other key pairing, club captain
Jason Turner and his ambitious wife
Tanya. Jason, a centre-forward descending the peak of his career, sports the most meticulously trimmed beard since
Craig David and a Chinese dragon tattoo which must prove an eternal headache to the
continuity girl. Both in her taste for the high life and her sordid machinations, Tanya is surely a spiritual sister of
Eva Perón.
By the end of the first episode, Jason and Tanya had already put the Earls Park chairman
Frank Laslett in a coma to stop him bringing Biagi to the club. His misgivings, and her instigation and subsequent madness, called
Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth to mind, almost certainly intentionally so. Laslett, meanwhile, spent most of his
screen time flat on his back - much the same position as Tanya, although for rather different reasons - and was rather over-zealously relieved by a near-
necrophiliac nurse who lent a whole new meaning to
intensive care.
Despite the first series' success among the media set and the 16-25 age group, ITV were apparently disappointed by its ratings, and it was reportedly only recommissioned because the show was lucratively sold to
Hungarian TV: so
that's what they get up to at
Ferenczvaros.
Not all its audience, however, seem to have got the joke: British registrars reported that 65 girls born in
Footballers' Wives first year had been named Chardonnay, or even Chardonay. One woman wrote to Shed Productions asking for a copy of the Pascoes'
wedding vows, and episode-by-episode guides to the cast's wardrobe are posted on the show's official website.
For series two, Chadwick and MacManus turned up the kitsch dial until it fell off, with a much-publicised plot strand that the Pascoes' beloved baby was in fact a
hermaphrodite. That said, the baby was in fact the result of an ill-fated liaison between Jason Turner, previously supposed infertile, and Kyle's mother
Jackie. Are you keeping up there at the back?
During the kerfuffle, Tanya manages to hop between the sheets with everyone from Jason's deep-voiced and therefore
obviously lesbian agent to Earls Park's
seventeen-year-old sensation improbably named
Darius. After a couple of episodes, nobody has even remembered that the Pascoes found a dead woman floating in their gloriously over-the-top
swimming pool.
The second series, which concluded on
February 26, 2003, made its homage to
Dallas explicit when its final cliffhanger left one of the lead characters for dead with a list of suspects as long as the closing credits. Suffice it to say that there's likely to have been a queue consisting of everyone but the hermaphrodite baby.
If you can't get enough of the damn thing, it's their fault: