Stacey & Joe: In Too Deep review – Solomon deserves better than these dismal old misogynistic tropes

Stacey Solomon is taking care of five children, 25 chickens, uncountable quail, a large house, a disabled dog and a hugely complicated, successful, busy and lucrative career. Her husband, Joe Swash, is dreaming of a hereditary lake business and adopting an emu.

Everything, in short, is much as it was as the third series of the reality show, Stacey & Joe (this time subtitled In Too Deep), about the nation’s noisiest celebrity couple, begins. Everything is still very loud. Well, Joe is still very loud and thus everyone else still has to strain to be heard over him. Except the cockerel, to whom it comes quite naturally. Joe is afeard of the cockerel. That is because the cockerel clearly hates him. If there ever came a time that the nation was required to choose sides in their war, I would side firmly with the fowl. But we’ll come back to that.

Last series – which I confess I did not watch religiously – saw Joe conceive of life as a lake lord. He had visions of creating a fishing idyll surrounded by wildflowers and camping pods, to which people would throng from far and wide. He is now looking forward to handing it on to his children. The only problem is that it doesn’t exist yet. He broke ground and then there was a drought. The two holes dug have now filled up, thanks to a wet January and February, but he is a year behind schedule. Although as Stacey is still telling him he needs to get a business plan together, you could argue that this is logically impossible. Though I wouldn’t bother because Joe’s not listening. He’s trying to scatter wildflower seeds and driving a tractor backwards into the lake.

He wants Stacey to manage the project. Some of Stacey’s contracts have ended and if she puts some of her own planned projects aside, she could do so. “You’re going to work together? Is that what you’re saying?” says Stacey’s executive assistant, Emma. They look at each other with what I can only describe as “expressions” on their faces. I would take a Celebrity Traitors Uncloaked-style series involving Emma and Stacey – or even just Emma – any time.

“Joe finds life easier when things aren’t planned,” explains Stacey later during one of the to-camera interviews that periodically take place in the renovated barn adjacent to the house – whenever, I suspect, the director has to get out of the chaos of Pickle Cottage – “and I’m the polar opposite.” Joe has recently been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I hope the diagnosis helps him and the whole family.

I’m having a sense of humour failure about the series, I realise – not because of the amount of slack Joe gets cut (and, if I infer correctly from his mother and sisters’ jocular approach to him, has always been cut) but because of the number of times Stacey is referred to as “bossy” or “controlling” or some synonym thereof. Please stop this. What she is is a powerhouse. What she is is a functioning, responsible, clever, ambitious woman without whom nothing and no one around her would survive. To have this articulated and apparently appreciated by no one in the programme and to effectively damn her as a nag instead, while lauding Joe’s ability to produce “a million good ideas” as if that is the only thing that matters, is to play into one of the oldest and most dismal of all misogynistic tropes.

While Joe is dancing about with glee at the news that his lakes are viable for fish populations, Stacey grabs the man who has accredited them and mines him for knowledge about what to plant around the lakes to keep the fish healthy, stop erosion and make Joe’s hazy dream a reality for him.

Look – Joe is charming, Joe is fun, he’s a devoted father and there is not an ounce of malice in him. He is, absolutely, a good guy. But this programme perpetuates so many marital and sex inequalities we see played out to real detriment in real life that – yeah, I’m too tired to find it even faintly amusing any more and too enraged to dismiss it. I’m Team Stacey. And, if needs be, Team Cockerel.