The Vardys review – It has all the makings of a reality classic. But it’s.......... actually deeply dull

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Jamie and Rebekah’s documentary is a strange mixed bag that doesn’t quite work either as silly, frothy entertainment or as a means of burnishing the Vardys’ reputation

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A show about Jamie and Rebekah Vardy’s move to northern Italy as the dust settles on the “Wagatha Christie” scandal should, in theory, be television gold.

Among the present crop of low-key but essentially forgettable WAGs – can you name any of the latest England squad’s other halves? It’s a far cry from the glory days of Baden-Baden – Rebekah is an outspoken, love-her-or-loathe-her character. Her vaguely villainous reputation has only been compounded by the mad celebrity pageantry of the “Wagatha” high court libel case, which she launched against fellow WAG Coleen Rooney, who accused Rebekah in a notorious 2019 tweet of leaking stories about her to the media (Rebekah lost the case, and later agreed to pay 90 per cent of Coleen’s legal costs).

All of this – her status as the Maleficent of the WAGs, her willingness to mouth off about those who have crossed her, and the aftermath of that legal row, as well as the potential culture clash as the family settle in Europe – means that ITV’s three-part series The Vardys has all the makings of a reality classic. And yet in practice, it’s.......... actually deeply dull. The most compelling aspect of the whole affair is arguably the Roman Holiday slash Lizzie McGuire Movie promotional photo, showing the couple perched on a moped.

As the cameras start rolling, 38-year-old Jamie is about to leave Leicester City, his footballing home for 13 years, where he became one of the most successful strikers in the Premier League. Despite his advanced (in footballing terms at least) years, he’s still attracting interest from international sides, eventually accepting an offer from Italian side Cremonese.

And so, in the deeply gendered world of football families, where the blokes go out and kick a ball around and the women look after the (massive) houses, Rebekah is tasked with the not insignificant logistical task of finding a new home and schooling for their younger kids (the couple have three children together and six between them).

We follow Rebekah as she looks round an almost comically unsuitable property in Milan, featuring what appears to be a dungeon and a bed with an inexplicable uplifting platform, that’s going for a song at $15,000 (£11,000) a month. But the issue here, and elsewhere in the show, is that the post-Wagatha Rebekah seems understandably guarded, for all her big talk about how “you either love me or you hate me”.

That doesn’t make for particularly fun viewing – especially when the show’s other main character is, well, not exactly a TV natural. Jamie, despite his footballing reputation as a bit of a trash talker, is subdued here too; his main catchphrase seems to be an equivocal “It’ll be fine”, which drives Becky mad.

There is the obligatory football-doc scene where Jamie walks us through his collection of career memorabilia (for some reason, there is also a Peaky Blinders poster hidden among the caps and the trophies). But none of it really seems to make him open up. The most animated we see him is when he goes off on a tangent about how Robin Hood wasn’t actually from Nottingham (“You’re an encyclopedia of crap,” Rebekah responds).

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Even the inevitable discussion of the Wagatha case doesn’t really tell us anything we hadn’t heard before, although you do get more of a glimpse of how the whole to-do impacted the Vardy kids, sent to school with bin liners up against the car windows to block out the photographers. “I don’t have any negative feelings towards her whatsoever,” Rebekah says of Coleen, with a look that might imply the harbouring of several negative feelings, actually. But the show doesn’t really give her any space to properly reflect, or tease out any sort of self-analysis. Even the glossy Beckham documentaries had more introspection – and more genuinely funny moments. Same goes for the Rooneys’ Disney+ effort, which documented the run-up to the court case.

The end result here is a strange mixed bag that doesn’t quite work either as silly, frothy entertainment or as a means of burnishing the Vardys’ reputation. Frankly, you wouldn’t really miss much if all the footage had happened to fall into the North Sea.

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