The glory of the Wagatha Christie affair, played out on social media and then in the high court, was twofold. First, it was the highest possible drama for the lowest possible stakes. Second, it had an epic sweep contained within a timeline short enough for even our fractured modern attention spans to manage.
Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story has not been vouchsafed these fundamental truths. It thinks we want a three-hour look behind the scenes, a recounting of every click on every post, a detailed description of every thought going through Rooney’s mind, alongside a recap of her childhood, marriage and much, much more. I don’t know how many people want a tour of Wayne’s trophy room in the Rooney mansion, but I suspect it is not a large percentage of the people who have tuned in. Most, surely, are looking for a reminder of that brief time when there was a break in the grey clouds of life and the country could bask in the ray of light afforded by the bizarre ding-dong between two footballers’ wives.
Here is what happened. Rooney noticed that a number of things she had posted on her private Instagram account were being leaked to the Sun. She worked out that it was probably Rebekah Vardy, whom she knew least well out of her private followers (mostly family and close friends), whom she felt liked attention and whom she knew to have a close relationship with the Sun. As such, she reconfigured her account so that only Vardy could see a series of fake stories she put up. Lo and behold, they were leaked. Rooney published her findings across her social media accounts and Vardy sued for libel. At the end of a straightforward yet hilarious trial that added much to the gaiety of the country, Vardy lost.
That is the teaspoon of narrative jam spread over the dry slices of documentary bread in The Real Wagatha Story. The first of the three episodes barely gets us to the inciting incident. We lay our scene in Mallorca, 2017, after a prologue showing Rooney dodging a paparazzo to get a coffee and affirming to camera the right to have her say in her own words now that everyone else has said their piece (and before – the words are unspoken, but hang heavy in the air – Vardy gets her programme out).
In Mallorca, Rooney is about to find out that Wayne has been caught drink-driving – with a woman who is not her in the car. The subsequent fallout is described in minute detail, although the only detail worth including is wordless – the expression on Rooney’s mum’s face, which seems to say of her son-in-law: “I love him, but sometimes I don’t like him. I want to shake him.” (Colette is unadulterated greatness.)
This is all just to get us to the point at which Rooney posts a picture to her private Instagram account of the family in bed wearing matching pyjamas, which is leaked to the Sun and results in a story about Wayne being allowed back into Rooney’s good books.
Then we are back to dwelling on flatly delivered minutiae. There is a tour of Croxteth in Liverpool, where the couple grew up, plus a potted history of their early years together, and Wayne’s star-making debut as a professional footballer (when Rooney “went from being a grade-A student to men jumping out at her from behind bins” says Colette, her face again adding much more). Their engagement follows, Wayne signs for Manchester United and they become ever greater tabloid fodder.
Then comes Wayne’s “misbehaviour” – referred to as that and only that. With a gritted “Some mistakes are harder to forgive than others” from his wife, we are back to the main storyline, which appears to be stretching out until the crack of doom.
On and on it goes. The second episode is a little more eventful, although it remains a laborious trek through vast tracts of wasteland in between the events we already know about. Do we need to hear about every dummy run she did before laying the final trap for Vardy? There is also an account of her sister Rosie, who had Rett syndrome and died in 2013 at 14, that feels crowbarred in tastelessly.
Maybe this documentary picks up when the trial is reached in the final episode (not available for review), but there can be nothing so interesting there – given its frenzied coverage at the time, and anatomisation since – that possibly justifies the hours of boredom that have preceded it. Rebekah, it’s over to you.
Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story is on Disney+
