We’re a wildly pro-Stacey Solomon house. As insufferable people do with, say, Radiohead, we always make it clear we were into her early stuff: from her 2009 audition for The X Factor. Nineteen, and singing the hell out of What a Wonderful World, she was giggly and self-deprecating, yet quietly smarter and funnier than everyone else too. And she was just loveable. A teenage single mum from Dagenham shooting her shot, in the sunniest way possible. She had us as she laughed, “Hiya!” to Simon Cowell.
“That girl is a star,” Pete and I said to each other, like we were showbiz experts, making an official statement to a waiting crowd. “A girl that cheerful will go far.”
Sixteen years later and, smugly, we have been proved right: Radiohead did, as we predicted, manage to follow up Creep, and Solomon is a national treasure. She’s so popular that she has been awarded the BBC’s greatest accolade: Stacey & Joe is a weekly reality show, where cameras follow her and fellow TV presenter/husband Joe Swash — also adorable — as they parent their loving, blended family of five children at the gorgeous “Pickle Cottage”.
“Is it time for Stacey & Joe?” Pete asks, every Tuesday at 8pm, as we sit on the sofa with our tea. Solomon is our televisual vitamin D, and Stacey & Joe is what we watch when we need to feel that the world is, ultimately, benign. Or… it was.
The unfortunate thing about being a fun-killing hardcore feminist is you see too much. Once you’ve donned what I think of as the Spectacles of de Beauvoir, everything comes into focus. Too much focus.
It started when Joe Swash put his T-shirt and trainers into the washing machine, accompanied by half a bottle of Domestos. “I want them to be really white,” he said, as the washing machine filled with foam. Stacey was, understandably, horrified.
“You don’t put Domestos in a washing machine!” she cried. “Everything will stink. Use laundry bleach!”
“I couldn’t find it,” Swash replied.
“It’s there!” Stacey said, exasperated — pointing to a shelf, next to the washing machine, and jar neatly labelled “Laundry bleach”, in Solomon’s careful handwriting.
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In the same episode, the family went on holiday. Stacey — with an efficiency that would put an army to shame — had packed for all five children, plus herself. On reaching the hotel, she filed away all the kids’ clothes in the wardrobe, each shelf holding a different day’s outfits.
Swash, by way of contrast, simply unzipped his suitcase, in the middle of the hotel room, and used that as his wardrobe. Every time someone came in and out of the room, they had to step over it.
“Joe! Use the wardrobe!” Stacey remonstrated — understandably averse to negotiating an obstacle course of adult men’s pants and shorts every time she came back to the room for a nap.
By the time Swash had promised he’d come back from a Lad’s Fishing Trip by 10am, so Stacey could attend a very important business meeting — spoiler alert: he was late, and she had to take the meeting while looking after two wailing toddlers — it was too late for me, as well.
I’d realised what we were really watching.
“This isn’t Stacey & Joe,” I said to Pete — now incredibly tense with feminism. “This is The Mental Load — the Movie. BBC1 is showing what women have been talking about for years: that, even if you’re the main breadwinner, you’re still the one in charge of running the house, and you’ll be the one dumped with juggling childcare with work. I’m finding this quite triggering, on behalf of womankind.”
In this light, I’ve started to see Stacey & Joe not as a joyful piece of primetime relaxation — but an important social document. Because the thing is, Joe Swash is lovely. He clearly adores his wife — “I know I’m punching!” he says, gleefully. When their children were small, it was Swash who took time off work to care for them, while Solomon’s career went stellar. He’s in the top 1 per cent of 21st-century fathers and husbands. You can’t, in any respect, call him a bad man. He’s gentle, humorous, hard-working and devoted.
But nonetheless — in every episode, the disparity. There are two high-profile showbiz adults, with big careers, in the house — but only one knows how to use the washing machine, or thinks to pick their clothes off the floor. And only one is finding time for fishing trips with the lads.
Stacey & Joe should be studied by everyone: husbands, wives, scientists. Because, finally, we have minute-by-minute footage of how the mental load can turn even a professionally sunny woman like Stacey Solomon — the living, human giggle! — into a weary, reluctant nag. One suitcase and bottle of bleach at a time.
