The Real Rooneys review – at least Wayne and Coleen’s reality show proves they can laugh at themselves

‘There are two obvious problems here, the first being that the Rooneys’ lives feel like fiction: he was a generational sporting talent, a one-in-a-million player whose success has bought him and Coleen a ridiculous Cheshire mansion with a cinema, indoor pool and adjacent football pitch. To get back to the road you have to drive over a bridge across a lake. As we join them, Coleen is working out how to capitalise on a recent appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, while Wayne is plotting an uptick in his media appearances that he hopes will make him a regular on Match of the Day. Technically, the Rooneys exist on our Earth, but – as they both admit, recalling their working-class childhoods in Croxteth, Liverpool – they have left ordinary life behind.

Even if we accept that they are to some extent real people, the further problem is that if you want to get to know someone, watching a behind-the-scenes “at home with” reality show is not the way to do it. This is an established format that was initially shaped by the Kardashians and has now evolved to fit the specific needs of retired British sportsmen looking to relaunch themselves as media personalities. By design, the shows are anything but realistic, instead offering a carefully calibrated blend of fantastic luxury that viewers can escape into, and domestic rituals – breakfast, the school run – offered up in a half-hearted attempt to show that really, these famous folk are just like us.

We are being sold a product that is fundamentally just the family brand, but is, these days, increasingly a commercial venture that the show happily advertises. So it is here, as episode one revolves around Coleen attending meetings with buyers and strategists at Primark, with a view to launching her debut fashion collection. We’re steered towards believing that the success of the line will be heavily dependent on Coleen herself, rather than Primark’s in-house experts dialling her input up or down to suit their purposes. The Primark bosses talk about Coleen being a good fit on account of how authentic, relatable and down-to-earth she is; that’s the commodity they’re buying.

Still, it’s not as blatant as Michael Owen’s aggressively cynical recent series Meet the Owens, which quickly descended into one long promo for his racehorse trading business – and which failed in its secondary mission to dispel Owen’s reputation for being boring, because it involved footage of him talking. Here, Coleen comes across as honest, self-aware and, crucially, someone who doesn’t seamlessly fit into the role she has been given. When the producers hand her a tablet with a photo gallery charting the history of the questionable outfits she has worn in public, her self-deprecating reactions are endearingly genuine.

Wayne Rooney, meanwhile, is a man who transcends the artifice of the celebrity reality documentary. The lazy tabloid caricature of him is that he’s not very bright, which doesn’t seem to be true at all: he’s not naturally as verbose as some of his peers and he’s certainly diffident in his dealings with Coleen and their four sons, but he shares his wife’s willingness to be the butt of a joke, particularly around the premature end of his coaching career after he left his role as manager of Plymouth Argyle by mutual agreement.

We get a glimpse of the Rooney family’s bantering sense of humour in one of the otherwise heavily sanitised chats with the kids, as they bounce and fidget on a vast, pearl-coloured sofa, when second eldest son Klay wheels out a perfect parody of a nasal Mancunian football pundit droning on about what a great player his dad was. “Oh, top drawer, honestly. He was top drawer. Back in the day, the way he got the ball and travelled with it, he was tyyyyop draaaa-wer. The power he had at such a young age, oh my word … ” Coleen, approximately 25 yards away on a different part of the same settee, is in hysterics.

Documentaries have a standard trick to make those sofa chats feel more natural, which is to let us hear the question being asked from somewhere behind the camera. This one takes that a step further by regularly spinning the camera around to show the interviewer and crew, as if to say: “Look how unfussy this programme is, it’s not like the others.” That’s only true up to a point, but the Rooneys are more real than most.