Wagatha Christie is now a Channel 4 drama – but in reality, it was a farce

It is arguably the only uplifting aspect of the year 2022 that its set piece courtroom drama was of such gloriously little consequence. Usually, when the media descends upon a courtroom for a front page feeding frenzy, something truly awful tends to have to have happened first. Usually blood has been spilled. But not, mercifully, in this case.

Vardy v Rooney, aka Wagatha Christie, has, unsurprisingly, been dramatised and will be broadcast on Channel 4 in two parts this week. Coleen Rooney’s lawyer, David Sherborne, has been honoured with the full Martin Sheen treatment. It is a factual drama, in the sense that the entire script is taken from the court transcript. Not a word is fiction.

It is not the first time such a device has been used. Ten years ago, the journalist Richard Norton-Taylor wrote a play, The Colour of Justice, of which all of the words were taken from the McPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It is a subject worthy of dramatisation, transposing a sometimes turgid but crucially important event into far more approachable form.

Vardy v Rooney is no such thing but who frankly cares? It is an attempt to allow the millions of people who became fixated on the trial to have a sense of what it was actually like in that little room. It is a noble endeavour but, as someone who was in that little room, covering, which is to say ridiculing the trial for The Independent, there is arguably a flaw.

Because Vardy v Rooney was not a drama, it was a farce. It could hardly have been more of a set piece comedic event if it had been scripted (which it now has been). One of the most obvious and effective comedic devices ever used is to take supposedly low brow material and subject matter and deliver it in an outwardly high brow way. In Posh, Laura Wade’s extremely insightful and generally superb play about the Bullingdon Club (which later became the film The Riot Club), the absurd old Etonians perform classic rap and hip hop hits between the scenes for little dramatic purpose other than it is uproariously funny.

In real life, the Wagatha Christie trial took this device to its unsurpassable extreme. The clipped voices of old Etonian barristers, the oak-panelled walls, the gowns and the wigs looked and sounded as if somebody was about to be transported to Botany Bay for life for the theft of a loaf bread. But the subject matter was about the difference between stories and main grid on Instagram, how Insta stories work, who was “fuming” with who at what point and why, and so on ad infinitum.

It could be argued it shed some vague light on the state of the modern world, in the sense that these very well-paid lawyers were being paid by women from lowly backgrounds but who were now much richer than them. And more significantly, their vast hourly charge out rates had not furnished any of them with a working understanding of Instagram, something that the vast majority of the population under the age of say 45 takes for granted.

The ebbs and tides of the trial and the brutal cross examination of Rebekah Vardy will not easily be forgotten by any who witnessed it. But it will also not be forgotten that it happened as a direct consequence of her decision to sue someone for libel for having accused her of doing something that a judge would later conclude she had indeed done. (Rebekah Vardy continues to deny this, in near countless television interviews. She is not assisting her rehabilitation in doing so.)

This is not to make light of the legitimate suffering of those involved. There’s no doubt that Coleen Rooney had become genuinely distressed by stories from her private Instagram account being monetised by someone she trusted but didn’t know who, particularly given that the newspaper involved was The Sun and she is a very proud Scouser.)

And there’s also no doubt that the social media whirlwind unleashed on Rebekah Vardy by Coleen Rooney’s sleuthing was unbelievably vicious, and that arguably Coleen Rooney should have known better. She said many times during the trial that she did not want to be there. That she had wanted to settle out of court. That, in other words, she could have done without the drama. But the initial act of high drama was her own. There were other avenues open to her. The demons did not have to be unleashed in quite such a way.

In real life, Wagatha Christie provided light relief to those living in a world going ever more mad. Some may choose to wonder whether more important events might be deemed worthy of dramatisation, and if in the future we might wonder whether more than we might have hoped was revealed about us when so much was going on and two footballers’ wives duking it out in the high court was deemed worthy of this kind of dramatic reconstruction.

It might also be something of a category error. The joy of Wagatha Christie lay in not taking it too seriously. Shine too bright a light on the tears and the heartache and the lives ruined, and it stops being quite so funny, and that frankly won’t do.