The British Are Coming! And They’re Not Wearing Any Knickers!

Chip, I think I may have found a keeper!  Footballers’ Wives is the funniest, trashiest, most over the top program I’ve come across in a while.  And yes, I’m including my other guilty pleasure, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, in that lot.  A bold statement, I know.

Footballers’ Wives follows the hilariously shallow and self-centered lives of the stars of fictional Earls Park FC “Sparks” and their WAGs. (WAGs is Brit-speak for “wives and girlfriends.”) The boys are all talented professional athletes, some intelligent and some, well, let’s just say at least they’re all pretty and have good teeth for a bunch of Brits.  Speaking of pretty, there’s a lot of footballer arse in this show. I realize it’s British TV and all, but the amount of bare male butt is just astonishing.  Not that I’m complaining....merely an observation.

In one of the first season’s episodes, Earls Park star Kyle and his fiancee Chardonnay Lane prepare for their wedding.  Yes, I said Chardonnay Lane.  What a name!  Chardonnay is what the Brits call a “glamour model.”  A glamour model is what Jordan/Katie Price is, or was, before her greater claim to fame became putting her toddler daughter in makeup and tweeting pictures to the world to annoy her ex-husband.  Did I lose you?  Chardonnay poses in her skivvies, or sometimes sans skivvies, for a living.  Sort of an across-the-pond Heidi Montag. Got it now?  The Chardonnay/Kyle wedding is a grand tabloid affair in which prince Kyle rides in on a horse while Chardonnay is lying “asleep” on a bed surrounded by seven children dressed as dwarves.  Yes, really.  Chardonnay awakens at her prince’s kiss, and the wedding takes place. Chardonnay’s dress is a giant pink cotton candy confection.  Of course.  What did you think she would be wearing?  The happy couple gives an “exclusive” on-camera interview to a tabloid reporter mid-reception as the guests wait for dinner.  Here’s a wedding pic of the happy couple, just in case you think I could make this kind of stuff up.

Team captain Jason and his hell-on-wheels wife Tanya are another great Footballers’ Wives couple. Tanya is the Head Mean Girl of the Earls Park WAGs and a watercloset cokehead.  She’s snorted up in the most posh loos in England. Jason is a serial womanizer, with a penchant for bathtubs and jacuzzis.  Must be all the rain over there.  Although Tanya and Jason seem to love to hate each other, the do their best work as a team, in classic soap opera style.  When Jason is worried the team management is bringing in Italian soccer stud Sal Biagi, both Jason and Tanya realize the threat this is to their rulers of the roost status and swing into action. Tanya puts on a shameless display of her feminine wiles for team chairman Frank.  Despite Frank’s assurances that the Biagi thing is all rumor and no truth, Biagi shows up on the club’s roster soon enough.  In the wake of the announcement, Tanya attacks Frank, bashing his forehead on the fender of his car without so much as breaking one of her ridiculously long fake nails or spilling any blood on her golf ball sized diamonds.  Jason and Tanya leave Frank on the roadside to die, only he doesn’t.  Turns out it’s a fate worse than death for poor Frank, who ends up with a creepy nurse who feels herself up with his comatose hand.  Ewww.  Jason goes on womanizing, and Tanya drinks, smokes, snorts, and hallucinates herself into a tizzy.

There are so many other wicked, riotously funny things going on in the series, and each character is more outrageous than the last.  I’m just sad I’m arriving late to the Footballers’ Wives party. This show has completed it run of five seasons and is now relegated to the province of the Internet and DVD. But, as they say, better late than never.  And bottoms up!