Television - Andrew Billen on ITV's new drama set in the world of footie glamour

Over Christmas, I was berated by an ITV executive for what I had written about the network in my end-of-year column. It was, if I may paraphrase him, fine for me to praise Bob and Rose and Cold Feet, but he had to face the dismal Barb figures on Tuesday mornings. I found an echo of his criticism in an interview that Brian Park recently gave to the Radio Times. Park is the co-producer of Footballers' Wives, which has just been launched on ITV1 (Tuesdays, 9pm), and was previously responsible for the bizarre ITV prison drama Bad Girls, a kind of Within These Walls rewritten with the instinctive tastefulness of Steve Coogan's Dr Terrible's House of Horrible. "You do need your Ken Loaches," Park conceded, "but we are not trying to make television that has been informed by Oxbridge bias. We are unashamedly populist."

Well, this column is as unashamedly Oxbridge-biased as you'll get, but I am not going to declare war on Footballers' Wives - even though the pedant in me wishes that the screen titles didn't leave off the apostrophe, and winces at the graphic designer's decision to turn the final "s" into a dollar sign. (Anyway, given the current state of the transfer market, shouldn't it be Footballers' Wiv s?) There is, for a start, no denying that this flash trash catches a zeitgeist that worships almost equally soccer, celebrity, money and sex. The trajectory of the plot is predictable, but comforting, too. Can one, in fact, tire of watching working-class youngsters being rewarded with too much too soon?

The footballers and their wives have it all on this show - but does that make them happy? Well, what do you think? "We're lucky bastards. We have everything you want," says Kyle, Earls Park FC's equivalent of David Beckham. This statement of the obvious is directed at his fiancee, Chardonnay Lane, a page-three model, a woman scarcely brighter or more emotionally coherent than Posh Spice herself. But their happiness does not go unpunished for long. At her hen night, a drunken salesman sets fire to Chardonnay's floral necklace, resulting in burn damage to her highly prized breasts. Not since Charlotte Bronte had Rochester blinded in the fire at Thornfield Hall has such cruel damage been inflicted on a symbol of sexual potency.

The other couples are no less troubled. The team captain, Jason, is a violent, adulterous madman married to a Lady Macbeth called Tanya (superbly played by Zoe Lucker). His idea of a quiet evening at home is to smash up the wall hangings. Her idea of a practical joke is to pretend she has taken an overdose. Jason's career is in trouble, mainly thanks to a bad case of attitude sickness, but also because of the arrival of a foreign signing from Italy. His paranoia leads him into a drunken fight with the hefty club chairman, fisticuffs in which Tanya so enthusiastically participates that she puts him in a coma. For a while, the police believe he has been injured in a car accident, but, as we Oxbridge critics know, you do not kill Duncan and get away with it for long.

As for the up-and-coming striker Ian and his wife, Donna, their future is jeopardised not by the game that has taken over their lives, but by what they left behind. Donna would rather stay at home and bath her daughter than dress up for the directors' box. She would like even more to be reunited with their son, Daniel, whom she gave away for adoption after giving birth to him at the age of 13 (this is not a script to make its points by halves). Unfortunately, Ian is in Premier League Denial, refusing to believe he even existed before he became a footballer. Episode two leaves little Daniel weeping for him in the rain. Don't Care was made to care.

The fun of trash TV, as Terry Wogan discovered with Dallas 20 years ago, is that its humourlessness leaves you the space to make your own jokes. Unless you actually find inflatable dildos at stag nights intrinsically hilarious, you have to work a little to find Footballers' Wives funny. But funny it is. Note that Donna has a wild sister called Marie, which means that their parents must have been Osmond fans, and that Chardonnay's racehorse is called Vin Blanc, in honour of both Red Rum and her name. And appreciate Philip Bretherton's sinister impression of Sven-Goran Eriksson, as the too-well-dressed German manager, Stefan.

This corn- and cleavage-driven show will succeed in filling ITV's depleted coffers because it is in tune with Britain's current aspirations. This is, however, exactly what should alarm us. We are surely meant to find little Daniel's adoptive mother, a cynical drudge from a housing estate, terrifying. But from the lofty vantage point of my bias, her life looked less appalling than the vacuous materialism of Ian and Donna's. When Daniel wore his dad's football strip in episode two, my heart filled with dread.

To respond to this show, you have to bring not only your sense of humour, but your own set of values. It lacks, you see, any of its own.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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