From Wags to witches... and we’re all transfixed

THINK Dynasty, except with more bling. Think Dallas, but with bigger mansions. Hell, do a mash-up of the two super-soaps of the 1980s, double up on the glamour, intrigue, betrayal and ridiculously big hair, and you’re still not even close to matching the year’s most talked-about drama, the one that’s transfixed viewers on both sides of the Atlantic right from this week’s explosive opening episode.

It landed on our desktops, televisions, newspapers and social media feeds without warning on Wednesday.

And within hours it had been gratefully seized upon by audiences, both here and in the United States, as a welcome respite from Brexit and Trump and climate change and impending conflicts. Like all the best escapist drama, of the kind that distracted us from the grim grind of everyday life back in the recession-hit Eighties, it is a saga that is at once both relatable and absolutely irrelevant.

We’ve all had our share of backstabbing ‘frenemies’ and tittle-tattling false friends, so the falling out between the uber-Wags Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy strikes an instant chord. But we can also enjoy the luxury of wallowing in the details, of picking a side and thrashing out the various twists and turns, of bingeing to our hearts content on utterly consequence-free, guilt-free gossip. Absolutely no innocent parties will be hurt in the making of this melodrama, because that ship sailed long ago: the two main characters have been in training for this high-velocity showdown for years.

The row between the two women combines the very best of the camp soap feud with the rules of an MMA cage fight: No holds, it seems, are barred. It all kicked off when Coleen noticed that details of her private life, shared only with her closest friends, were turning up on the tabloid gossip pages. So she decided to set a trap.

The mystery had been going on for years, and the sting took five months to execute. She began posting false stories and, one by one, blocked her friends from seeing them. As soon as they stopped appearing, she figured she’d know that the last pal blocked must have been the source. Rebekah Vardy was obviously the very last person she suspected because she was the last woman standing, in Coleen’s personal Instagram circle, when the made-up stories kept on surfacing. They ranged from the trivial – a flooded basement in her new home – to the downright juicy and intrusive – a trip to a gender selection clinic in Mexico – but, bingo, they all made the papers.

So, just like Inspector Poirot explaining how he narrowed down his list of suspects to point the finger of blame, Coleen posted the gripping denouement to her two million-plus social media followers.

Just one person, she dramatically revealed, had viewed them all… on Rebekah Vardy’s account. If this was ‘Dallas-ty meets MMA’, that would have been the cliff-hanger end of episode one, but since we’re no longer used to waiting for the next instalment in these days of binge-watching, episode two came hot on its heels.

REBEKAH issued a tearful and wounded denial, and in order to clear her name and patch up their friendship, she flew home early from her holiday in Dubai. Well, as you do.

Netflix was among the captivated spectators of the drama, and instantly announced that they’d have to make a documentary on the story. But this isn’t the stuff of a docu-drama – this is a full blown 12-parter, with plot twists and a costume budget to put Catherine the Great to shame. In fact, one of the reasons that this story has proved so gripping, and even made the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times, this week, is because we’ve been starved of this calibre of escapist and wonderfully preposterous frivolity for years. Serial murders, kidnappings, police corruption, natural disasters and man-made catastrophes have dominated our viewing schedules for some time now: there’s scarcely a blonde Scandinavian woman who hasn’t been cut in half and dumped on a bridge, and for all its terrifying worthiness, Chernobyl is nobody’s idea of a fun night in.

But rich and pampered women setting about one another’s hair extensions with their €7,000 handbags and their gem-studded acrylic nails? Bring it on!

All hail Rebekah and Coleen, then, for spicing up our relentless diet of doom and gloom – let us hope this one runs and runs.