Fiona Rae: Let's hear it for TV's cows

COMMENT

You've got to hand it to the British - they do a good line in female television characters who rhyme with witch. The dynasty of television cows stretches back to Ena Sharples grumping and gossiping and criticising in the Rover's snug on Coronation Street to today's witchiest witch of them all, Footballers' Wives' Tanya Turner. Ena would have a few choice words to say about her, by gum.

Tanya gets all the good lines. (In more ways than one: she did once declare, "From now on there's only one bloke for me -- Charlie," before diving nose-first into a big pile of cocaine.)

Last week, she was putting down her rival for new Sparks' captain Conrad, his wife Amber, with "if she thinks that a trick pelvis and a bit of Botox are enough to keep him, she's got another think coming". This was after the catfight in the players' lounge, in which she busted said wife's ass.

I won't spoil the surprise, but let's just say Frank, the club chairman, is not safe around Tanya - not that he ever was. She already tried to kill him once in the first series, why the hell did he marry her? Apart from attempted murder, the list includes blackmail, drug abuse, perjury, shagging anything with a shadow and paying someone to impersonate her at an old folks' home.

It's a shame the producers saw fit to get rid of her ex-husband Jason Turner, who was as conniving, evil and nasty as Tanya, although it was a surprise that little Chardonnay was his opportunistic killer -- I was picking Darius, the young player Tanya seduced and then pushed naked into the night when she'd got sick of him. He's lovesick and would do anything - although a slow dance with Jordan might put paid to that.

But, like the title says, the women are at the centre of Footballers' Wives, with the ever-present threat of the tabloid newspapers lurking in the background. It's as if the series' writers bought six month's worth of the Sun and turned them into a drama series.

At every bizarre twist of the storyline you're mentally writing the headline: "Chardonnay and Kyle's secret baby heartache!" or "Italian stallion beds manager's daughter!"

In this series, it will be Harley' girlfriend who will go from "minger", as she was called in the tabs, to red-hot mama, or some such, the more plastic surgery she has.

The British don't have the market cornered on mingers, malevolent mamas and murderers though. One US TV "bee-yich" is turning out to be just as monstrous as her mom: The Sopranos' Janice.

Lazy, manipulative, entirely amoral, like Tanya, she is not above murder. She is being turned into her mama, the dreadful Livia. She is also being given the chance to destroy another Italian boy's life by virtue of her new surrogate family - in a scene last week, she took a chocolate milkshake off Bobby jnr. We heard later that he is wetting the bed nearly every night. Read between those lines if you have the stomach.

Closer to home, I have to put a word in for our newest TV cow: Shortland Street's brassy Avril who is, in the time-honoured tradition, on reception, where she can oversee all comings and goings at the clinic.

She has already forced a raise out of Nick and got her uncle a spot of free advertising when he supplied the meat pack for the raffle. Clearly the start of an excellent career as top - er - witch.