Wagatha Christie’s coming to the small screen: Coleen Rooney/Rebekah Vardy showdown is being adapted by Poldark’s screenwriter

Wagatha Christie is the drama we cannot get enough of – and luckily for us, it is being made into, quite literally, a television drama by one of the screenwriters behind Poldark.

Debbie Horsfield, who adapted the Poldark novels into the popular 2015-19 BBC historical drama series, will take her hand at chronicling the well-known Wagatha Christie showdown between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy. 

The ongoing libel court case between two of the most well-known footballers’ wives (or WAGs) of all time ended last week. High Court Judge Justice Steyn found the former had not committed libel against her fellow friend in accusing her for leaking private information to the tabloids, because the accusation was “substantially true”.

You’d have to have been living in a cave to have not followed the drama, beginning in October 2019, where Coleen played some clever Instagram tactics to “trap” Rebecca into seeing Instagram Stories in which Coleen shared false information about her life. 

The trick was to catch Rebecca out in order to identify her as the close source who had been feeding stories about Coleen to the tabloids. “These leaks from my private Instagram account began in 2017. They continued for almost two years, intruding on my privacy and that of my family,” Coleen said in a statement to the High Court.

This culminated in a very public “outing” in October 2019. “It’s…Rebekah Vardy,” Coleen infamously announced on social media, outing her one-time friend. The clash saw Coleen being dubbed #WagathaChristie on social media – a homage to bestselling detective novelist Agatha Christie.

Following the social media clash, Rebekah accused Coleen of libel – and prolonged court proceedings ensured that we could never forget the 2019 dispute. And now it seems that it will never leave our consciousness…

Fittingly, the show will be created by Horsfield in collaboration with Blueprint Pictures, the makers of A Very English Scandal (a drama starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw, chronicling the real-life story of politician Jeremy Thorpe who plotted to murder his former lover Norman) and A Very British Scandal (that of the confusingly similar title, centred around the high-profile divorce court proceedings between the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, and starring Claire Foy alongside Paul Bettany). 

It’s not the only television adaptation of the real-life story though; far from it. We known that production company Chalkboard has been commissioned by Channel 4 to make a dramatic reconstruction of the case based on courtroom transcripts, while Netflix is also planning a documentary around the events, according to Deadline. 

Watch this space – it seems the #WagathaChristie drama is far from over, even if it’s moving to a more fictionalised sphere now.