Have you ever wondered what Spooks would look like it if starred Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs and Patrice Evra? Chances are it would look like this Wayne Rooney wine advert.
Just ignore the fireball for a minute and imagine they’re talking about an Iranian assassin who’s on his way to the City of London to whack a Russian oligarch right under the noses of MI5. Either that or imagine the fireball is a plutonium-tipped scud missile, sent by Barcelona, all the way to West Manchester.
And imagine that Wayne Rooney is a modern-day Karla; his watch can tap into CCTV and shoot poison darts and stuff like that. Evra is, um, the muscle. Giggs the inside man with his own chest wig. This is exactly what it would be like! Wayne will need to break every rule in the in the book, call in every last favour, pull out every stop if he’s to beat The Devil!
Find all that a little bit unbelievable? Well, yes, but not quite as unbelievable as casting Wayne Rooney in a speaking part, even one that mostly has words of one syllable, probably spelled out for him phonetically on large pieces of soothing-coloured paper.
This is, remember, a man so stupid that having shagged an old woman behind his girlfriend’s back he then left the woman in question an autograph with “I shagged you” written on it. A man who can only go to sleep if there’s a hair-dryer on in the room. A man to whom the advert’s directors had to explain that wine was ‘funny-tasting lager’ for him to agree to do it.
What’s also interesting about this is how much Giggs is investing in it. He looks genuinely concerned by Rooney’s mumbled non-sequiters – as if Rooney is discussing a dirty bomb buried in Mancunian Way. As if his personal chest-waxer has quit. As if he’s expecting Rooney to tell him that his super-injunction is falling to bits on Twitter and that people know he shagged his brother’s wife. And why are the trio of MUFC footie-kickers so concerned about the arrival at Old Trafford of, well, some wine?
Yes, Wayne Rooney is indeed a strange choice for an advert about wine. For any other advert for that matter. But wine? There’s more chance of him reading Martin Chuzzlewit.