Jamie and Rebekah Vardy’s new reality show will disappoint every single person who tunes in, from football lovers to followers of The Scousetrap. The only possible fun you can have is rolling your eyes at them. If you are tuning in to the new three-part reality show The Vardys you will be disappointed. Whatever the reasons or expectations you have for tuning in, you will be disappointed. This is because it is very bad and very boring.
Leicester fans won’t get much of Jamie or any footage they haven’t seen before. Much of what is shown in the first two episodes is to do with the troughs of his early days at the Italian club Cremonese – injury, stress, failing to dazzle in his debut, failing to score many goals thereafter – rather than his glory days at home. For fans of the 2022 legal case, Rebekah has little to say: “Never, ever, ever will I apologise for something I didn’t do. Hell will freeze over before I do that.”
The show is a slow grind through the minutiae of packing up a house and moving a family to Italy once Jamie takes his leave of Leicester City and signs with Cremonese. Watching people move house, try to find school places for five children, moan about getting visas and finding a house to rent is about as interesting as listening to people describe their dreams. The only possible fun is rolling your eyes at the pretence that Rebekah would have bothered to look at a house on the market at €13,000 a month instead of dismissing it the minute she saw a single online picture.
We have the traditional strewing of banalities intoned as if they were the lost writings of Socrates, and the desperate pretence of drama where there is none. Will Jamie score a goal? Will Cremonese get relegated? All this and more most viewers will already know. The rest will long since have flipped over to a rerun of one of the Beckham hagiographies, the recent Vinnie Jones documentary, or perhaps just taken themselves off for a nap.
