Footballers' Wives

The return of Footballers' Wives for a fourth series prompts praise from Mark Lawson in The Guardian.

Last year, I heard Zöe Lucker (who plays Tanya Turner, the fatal female of the series) being interviewed on radio. When she spoke glowingly of the show, the host put her down with: "It's not exactly Shakespeare, is it?" But this comment is at least half-wrong. While even an aficionado has to acknowledge that the dialogue rarely matches that of the Stratford dramatist - "I was pissed and she was rat-arsed" is a representative line from the series four opener - the plots are firmly in the classical tradition: all double weddings, mistaken identities and, to start off the new series, swapped babies.