Coleen Rooney: The Real WAGatha Story - Attention Seeking Laid Bare
Colleen Rooney comes out as the big winner in this documentary series but we need a deeper examination of why people need so much attention.
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What would someone do for attention? That is the question examined by the new insightful and fascinating Disney+ series Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story. By using the context of the well known court case between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, Director Lucy Bowden is able to examine the parasitic relationship between the tabloid press and famous people and how this feeds the public’s insatiable appetite for ‘Celebrity’ which in turn draws in attention seekers like moths to a flame.
If you are unfamiliar with the background then let me bring you quickly up to speed. First of all WAG is a slightly derogatory term coined by the tabloids to describe the Wives and Girlfriends of famous male football players - there is no equivalent currently available for those in a relationship with female football players!
This story centres around Coleen Rooney, wife of England footballer Wayne, who suspected that somebody was leaking stories to The Sun newspaper from her private Instagram account. By a process of deduction she worked out who it might be and then set a trap so that only one person could see specific fake stories that she posted. When those stories appeared in The Sun, Coleen went nuclear. She posted on Twitter that she had suspected that someone was leaking her private stories and that she had discovered who it was. She then let the world know that the leak was coming from the account of another footballer’s wife….Rebekah Vardy!
Rebekah Vardy denied having leaked stories and sued Coleen for libel. The trial gripped the nation but in the end the judge decided that Vardy was an unreliable witness and she lost the case which also landed her with a legal bill estimated at £3million.
Because of the way Coleen discovered Rebekah’s duplicitousness the case was dubbed WAGatha Christie by Dan Atkinson who has been writing for over 40 years but will likely be only remembered for this Tweet!
Like much in tabloid land the term WAGs is an essentially misogynistic term employed to imply that these women must be somehow shallow and stupid -in this series Coleen blows that theory out of the water! WAGs garner lots of media attention because they tend to be young, (usually) white and ‘pretty’ which is perfect fodder for tabloids. So much coverage is given to WAGS that according to former tabloid editor and alleged phone hacker Piers Morgan ‘it is the ambition of many girls to be in a relationship with a footballer’. This statement may sound old fashioned but it points to the legitimisation of getting attention as an end in itself and, as a young woman, you might conclude that if you want lots of attention then you need to find yourself a footballer!
Both Coleen and Rebekah get lots of attention but both arrived there in very different ways.
Coleen first started getting attention as a 16 year old when Wayne (they have been together since school) first hit the big time. In fact the first tabloid picture of Coleen was taken when she was walking home from school - in her uniform. (this photo also appears in the Disney+ documentary)
As Wayne’s career lifted off with Manchester United and England so did Coleen’s profile and she went on to become a magazine columnist, a TV Presenter and style icon who was known as ‘the nation’s favourite girl next door’. Her husband’s fame got her noticed but her talent, intelligence and actual achievements made her a household name and gave her a credible presence outside of WAGdom. Coleen Rooney is now known for being herself, she has nearly a million Instagram followers on her public account, does Vogue covers and gets attention wherever she goes.
Rebekah Vardy’s route to getting attention is not quite as straightforward. She is married to a footballer, Jamie Vardy, who is not quite as successful as Wayne Rooney but is fairly well known. However, Rebekah first entered the public consciousness when she sold a story to the News of the World which was a Sunday tabloid and sister paper to The Sun. The News of the World eventually got closed down for illegally hacking the phones of many famous people and a murdered teenager. The story that Rebekah sold for a reported £40,000 was about having sex with a minor pop star called Peter Andre. But in a clever twist that got her a load of attention she claimed that Andre’s penis was like a small chipolata and he was not a very good lay! This story got her attention - especially as she was married at the time. To be fair, in a moment of classiness, Vardy claimed that she had sent an apology message and flowers to Andre and his wife.
Several years later Rebekah met Premier League footballer Jamie Vardy while she was working as a nightclub promoter. She ended the relationship she was in and married Vardy. The next steps were standard: big wedding in a castle photographed by Hello magazine and weirdly also featuring OneD’s Louis Tomlinson. Rebekah then took part in the truly shit awful I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here reality show - the word ‘celebrity’ in the title is a loose term - she went on to compete in Dancing On Ice and appeared as a Guest on Loose Women. Rebekah has had to work hard to keep getting noticed but, before the court case, she was literally famous for being famous and was very good at getting attention.
In The Real Wagatha Story we learnt how Rebekah was allegedly able to get articles about herself in The Sun and its sister magazine, Fabulous by leveraging inside information about her husband’s team mates in exchange for either cash or coverage - and she was helped in this endeavour by her agent Caroline Watt. One PR expert interviewed for the documentary suggested that the articles are all about nothing although the amount of coverage that Rebekah got was Victoria Beckham level. The attention helped maintain Rebekah’s profile in lieu of actually doing anything.
Rebekah Vardy clearly has a level of cynicism mixed with determination which is kind of admirable. What fascinates me more, however, is why she worked so hard for all this attention. Is this a sad indictment of ‘influencer culture’ that imbues photos taken in Dubai with a meaning implying success and that values followers as an achievement in itself? Could it be that for Rebekah there was no other route out of her tough and challenging childhood?
I can totally understand the need to run and put distance between where you come from and where you are. For me it is only now that I am in my fifties that I have begun to be more open about coming from a poor, oppressive and unstable background. The thought process goes something like ‘if I can show the world how well I’m doing - and especially show those who I knew back in the day - then I can rebuild myself, reinvent myself and recreate myself in the way I want to be’ There is a line in the Pet Shop Boys song Being Boring that really sums this up:
“I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be”
The Pet Shop Boys went to London, wrote and recorded wonderful songs and became the creatures they wanted to be. Rebekah Vardy sold a story about a pop star’s sexual performance and married a famous footballer which led her to maybe become the creature that she always meant to be. From a world of alleged abuse inside the cultish Jehovah’s Witnesses she had got herself onto magazine covers and TV shows. She showed them that she was something because the level of attention she was getting was usually reserved for people like Victoria Beckham or Coleen Rooney.
Rebekah is not alone. There are thousands of men and women who want attention and social media can make them feel like they have a tool to achieve that. For Rebekah Vardy she used somebody else’s social media to get her the attention that would authenticate her.
It is easy to judge Vardy because, in the simple sense, what she did was wrong. The judge in her libel case essentially accused her of lying but I believe that she told untruths out of a desperation to protect the artifice she had created. She had escaped the shitty Norfolk council estate, she had escaped the abusive cult and she had become someone. There was no way that she was going back. Even now a year later Rebekah is still sniping at Coleen on Instagram and still professing that she did nothing wrong - continuing to protect what she has created.
Many have asked why did Rebekah sell Coleen’s stories and why did she bring the court case? The answer to both questions is attention. But nobody is asking why she needed that attention. Some of the answer comes from the fact that as a society we have a concept such as WAGS in the first place. But while middle class commentators sneer at these women, nobody is asking if Piers Morgan was right to say that, even in the 21st century, young girls still want to marry footballers? The key to marrying a famous or wealthy man is getting his attention! And if this is the extent of young women’s ambitions then why is that?
The Wagatha Christie trial has been turned into a play and there is a two part TV dramatisation as well as the Disney+ documentary. While all of these explore our obsession with fame and celebrity none of them look into what drives a person to seek attention. What drives somebody to put themselves on Love Island, Big Brother or The Apprentice? What hole in the soul is made whole by appearing in underwear on a magazine cover? This is what we now need to discover!
I really enjoyed this series and I came away with an incredible level of respect for Coleen Rooney who needs her own series. Although it is unlikely she will ever speak with Rebekah Vardy again I would love to see Coleen take a look at those who seek attention through shallow fame. She could find out what personality traits they might share? Are they trying to escape their background? And what happens when the attention stops?
Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story is streaming on Disney Plus
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