I’m surely not the first person to wonder what the neighbouring royals — now inching ever closer to the throne — are thinking when Vogue Williams takes to the airwaves with her bestie Joanne McNally to talk about bestiality or vaginal tightness or just curse up a blue streak. You’d worry that, given the English muckity’s feelings about one’s need for discretion, all this loose (upper!) lipness could have Tower of London consequences.
Portmarnock-born Williams, as many of us are aware, is British royalty adjacent: her husband Spencer Matthews’s sister-in-law is Pippa Middleton (and we hardly need to explain who she is). Williams, model, reality TV star and former Westlife wife, makes fun of the extreme poshness of “Spenny”, and pays tribute to the queen (when McNally objects to the royal reverence on the basis of, you know, all of Irish history, Williams’s rejoinder is “She was good in the Crown!”). Meanwhile, McNally is there to keep her grounded while stealing her designer clothes and raiding her fridge.
My Therapist Ghosted Me — so-called because this happened to McNally which, if you listen to more than a few episodes of MTGM, of course it did — is two privileged white ladies having the chats about plastic surgery, bad boyfriends and drinking. But it’s also so much more, and the no-holds-barred approach feels somehow subversive in its context.
The fact that these two are London-based, mixing in the uppermost of England’s class tiers, is part of the joy of MTGM: the keep calm and carry on memo has been stuffed in a drawer with the Solpadine, and in its place is a raucous, gossipy, unabashedly bawdy delight.
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These two — both shamelessly acquisitive and highly produced, at least in the physical sense — somehow stay grounded as, over the course of half-hour episodes, they discuss the shocking good looks of Jersey cows, the Don’t Worry Darling debacle, raiding Trócaire boxes and wanky-woos. They’re Daily Mail-enthralled dirt-dishers but they’re also razor-sharp in their repartee, and direct in their delivery, bringing enough self-awareness to their own ridiculous lives to take much of the sting out of the bling.
McNally brings out the best in Williams: she’s sharp and funny and brazen but also deeply, endearingly real
McNally brings out the best in Williams: she’s sharp and funny and brazen but also deeply, endearingly real. (Apart from the Botox, obvs.) She’s the single one, the messy friend with the messier love life, who’s ready to be the butt of the joke and roll her eyes at her always-too-beautiful-for-words friend, as frank about her eating disordered past as she is about the boyfriend who fell asleep during sex when she was, she claims, really “giving it her all”. Williams plays the sleep-deprived mother dousing her kids in Calpol while her bestie spends half the day in her pyjamas, and trying to avoid sex with Spenny while somehow finding time for myriad podcasts, TV shows and brand collaborations, not to mention all the personal maintenance required when you’re constantly being papped.
You could be judgey: all the booze blackouts, the focus on body image, the celebrity obsession and collab lust. But Williams and McNally wouldn’t care, and that’s what’s so appealing. Underpinning it all is their deep affection for each other — on full display in every insult thrown — like a warm Avoca blanket that likely cost upwards of €600 but you can’t deny it warms the bones. This podcast will not make you smarter, but MTGM is honest and funny and its own kind of mid-Atlantic-accented equaliser, where nobody is beyond the scope of slaggery: from randy husbands to royalty, they’re coming for us all. One is most amused.
