Footballers’ Wives

I have no idea why I’m doing a show from 2002, but it seems to have been a classic year for vintage TV.  In addition, the Desperate Housewives post whipped up a storm of reads, so I’ve decided that wives is a popular theme, and this show is about wives as well (clue’s in the title).  Then, I’m amplifying that with the power of nostalgia, after the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post drew more attention than I was prepared for: turns out we like to relive our memories of shows from when we were younger and less jaded, safely in the EU and certain of an economically prosperous future.

The next uninteresting detail I will talk you through at length is the orthography of the show’s name itself.  After some soul searching, I’ve decided to go with Footballers’ Wives, as you’ll see from the header on the post.  This is significant because at any one time I am devoting 20% of my life’s energy to grammatical pedantry.  Even at the age of 17, when this week’s programme was first broadcast, my teenage self was appalled at the lack of plural possessive apostrophe concluding the opening credits: Footballers Wives.  You’re only young once, so I’m glad I spent that time obsessing about punctuation.  Otherwise, how on earth are you supposed to know that the wives belong to the footballers?  It just looks like a strange, unconnected list.  But then, matters were made worse once I reminded myself how things really appeared: footballers wive$.  I won’t unpick why this is an abomination in my eyes (and if you don’t know why, then get out now please), but it does serve handily to illustrate the level of class on offer in this show.  In short, there was none.  Let’s crack on, then.

But first, it’s 2018, so let’s dispel the myth that wives are the property of their husbands (with or without the appropriate apostrophe to indicate this possession).  Yes, in this day and age, people can’t wait to rush up the aisle in order to spend thousands of pounds on flowers that nobody will remember and to secure a sofa buddy for future series of The Crown, but vows tend to be more about an equal partnership rather than referring to any duty of obedience.  But this was the beauty of Footballers’ Wives – the ladies wore the trousers.  Everything about the menfolk was incidental.  There were merely possessions to trade.  Even their footballing prowess was limited to a couple of lines in the script – almost no actual match footage ever appealed.  For someone with better things to do than sit through any sort of ballsport (such as watching reruns of dinnerladies) this only added to the programme’s appeal.

Let’s look at Tanya Turner, the ur-WAG.  Throughout the five series (yes, five!) she ended up in all manner of relationships, working through around half of the Earls Park FC first team, a proportion of the support staff and anyone else who just happened to be passing for that matter.  This wasn’t a search for love, though, but a quest to keep herself in acrylic nails and extraordinarily tacky outfit choices with no expense spared.  Once ex-captain Jason was dispatched, she fought for a place in new signing Conrad Gates’ bed (despite his straightened hair), dallied with sports agent/chairwoman Hazel Bailey and even found the time to get herself astride Frank Laslett, the overweight, over-age chairman of the club, specifically with the intention of shagging him to death.  Imagine talking about that storyline in the office the next day.  But the combination of cocaine, booze and vigorous love making did the job – our Tanya got what she wanted out of each chap (or chapette, in the case of Hazel) and then moved on to the next one.  Played with bags of aplomb by Zöe Lucker (whom I don’t seem to spot on TV these days, but ought to be a national treasure), Tanya was a popular creation, rooted for by an audience that was fully entertained by her outrageous behaviour.

In fact, the show suffered whenever she was absent.  IMDB tells me that Gillian Taylforth (Cathy from Eastenders, everyone) appeared in the most episodes, playing Jackie Pascoe, the overbearing pushy mother.  Yet, my most memorable character is Nurse Dunkley.  The name in itself is a comic moniker for someone you’re never going to take seriously.  But her arc was as sinister as they come: caring for Frank Laslett during his coma (obviously) she went from an apparently incidental background artist to front-of-camera abuser, pursuing a physical relationship with the unconscious man in her care, while whispering sweet nothings to him in her simpleton-sounding northern accent.  Her spectacles practically steaming up with lust is an image that still haunts me to this day.

But this was what we all tuned in for: far-fetched melodrama.  But you can watch that in most soap operas, so the attraction is better qualified as: far-fetched melodrama involving wealthy, mostly attractive people in glamorous settings.  Which is loads better.  Babies were swapped.  Boob implants caught fire.  Murders were attempted and completed.  Sex videos were leaked.  Joan Collins popped in.  Peter Stringfellow popped in.  This was the level of Footballers’ Wives.  As a result, it was wickedly fun.  I’m not ashamed to admit I also really enjoyed the foul language and frequent nudity – seeing someone being told to f*** off when their boobs are peaking over the duvet is oddly gratifying when you’re a teenager with punctuation-related anxiety.

Sadly, the show ended in 2006; it may well have been shagged to death itself to be honest.  I don’t even know if there’s any way to watch it these days, shy of trawling car boots for the old DVDs and then squinting at the appalling image quality with your HD-accustomed eyeballs, before realising things look appalling due to the noughties fashions the show so willingly embraced.  In fact, I don’t even recommend re-watching; times have changed, and the old show’s website still exists here, reminding you how crude the old internet was.  Have a click around and think of times past.  This is the trash that brought millions to ITV’s peak schedule.  At least now we have Love Island, eh?