Shelley Webb is a British TV presenter, writer, and sports journalist and author of the book Footballers' Wives Tell Their Tales. The book was the basis of the ITV series Footballers' Wives , which was an "enormous hit." [1]
Webb married former England footballer Neil Webb, and the couple had two children Luke and Josh, who both became professional footballers. [2] Webb's father was a professional footballer, and she has been a fan since childhood. [3] She was a university student when she and Neil met. [3] They married when she was 21. [3]
Webb, who holds a first-class honours degree in English and History, trained as a journalist before her marriage and resumed that career with the local Nottingham Evening Post, working as an occasional sports writer. She was forced to turn down a job as a radio broadcaster in Nottingham when Neil Webb moved from Nottingham Forest to Manchester United. [4] She later moved to TV presenting. [4] [5] She worked as an on-air journalist for Standing Room Only (UK TV Progamme), then for BBC World Service Television. [4]
This professional visibility led to interviews about her life as a footballer's wife, and, eventually, led her to write the book Footballers' Wives Tell Their Tales in 1998, [6] the year she and Neil split up. [7]
Her Footballers' Wives looked at the reality of being a modern footballer's wife. [8] [9] Webb interviewed 14 of her fellow footballer's wives for her 1998 book, painting what The Daily Telegraph called "a dismal picture of chronic insecurity, upheaval, boredom and loneliness." [10]
The book was the basis for the TV series Footballers' Wives , a series that portrayed the lives of footballers and their families in the years when they became "like pop stars", receiving a level of coverage that the Scotsman described as "even sillier" than fan enthusiasm, as well as offers of sex and a lack of privacy. [5]
Roderick Andrew Anthony Jude McDowall was a British and American actor, whose career spanned over 270 screen and stage roles across over 60 years. Born in London, he began his acting career as a child in his native England, before moving to the United States at the outbreak of World War II. He achieved prominence for his starring roles in How Green Was My Valley (1941), My Friend Flicka (1943), and Lassie Come Home (1943). Unlike many of his contemporaries, McDowall managed to evolve from child star into an adult performer and appeared on Broadway as well as in films, winning a Tony Award for his performance in Jean Anouilh's The Fighting Cock. For portraying Octavian in the historical epic Cleopatra (1963), he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. Offred is the central character and narrator and one of the "Handmaids": women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", who are the ruling class in Gilead.
"Bluebeard" is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of the present one to avoid the fate of her predecessors. "The White Dove", "The Robber Bridegroom", and "Fitcher's Bird" are tales similar to "Bluebeard". The notoriety of the tale is such that Merriam-Webster gives the word Bluebeard the definition of "a man who marries and kills one wife after another". The verb bluebearding has even appeared as a way to describe the crime of either killing a series of women, or seducing and abandoning a series of women.
Daniel Ronald Cox is an American actor, singer and songwriter. He is best known for his acting work, appearing in numerous films and television series since his 1972 debut in Deliverance. Cox is also active as a musician, performing over 100 times per year at festivals and theaters each year as of 2012.
Footballers' Wives is a British television drama about fictional Premier League football club Earls Park F.C., its players, and their wives, broadcast on ITV from 2002 to 2006. The show initially focuses on three very different couples, but from the third series onward revolves around a complex love triangle between Tanya Turner, Amber Gates, and Conrad Gates.
Stevie Cameron was a Canadian investigative journalist and author. She worked for various newspapers such as the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. She co-hosted the investigative news television program, The Fifth Estate, on CBC-TV in the 1990s. She was also an author of non-fiction books, including On the Take (1994) about former prime minister Brian Mulroney. Her exposé on Mulroney and the Airbus Affair led to many legal battles including a judicial hearing to determine if she was an RCMP confidential informant: she was not. The fact that Mulroney did take a substantial amount of money while still in government was confirmed in the 2010 Oliphant report. Her final books dealt with the disappearance and the killing of several Indigenous women in the Vancouver area in the mid-1990s to the turn of this century. These murders were ultimately attributed to convicted serial killer Robert Pickton. She won the 2011 Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book for her work on the Pickton case. Besides being a journalist and author, she was also a humanitarian, helping start programs for the underprivileged and homeless such as Second Harvest and the Out of the Cold program. For her lifetime work as a writer and humanitarian, she was invested into the Order of Canada in 2013.
The Frog Princess is a fairy tale that has multiple versions with various origins. It is classified as type 402, the animal bride, in the Aarne–Thompson index. Another tale of this type is the Norwegian Doll i' the Grass. Eastern European variants include the Frog Princess or Tsarevna Frog and also Vasilisa the Wise ; Alexander Afanasyev collected variants in his Narodnye russkie skazki, a collection which included folk tales from Ukraine and Belarus alongside Russian tales.
Question Quest is a fantasy novel by American writer Piers Anthony, the fourteenth book of the Xanth series.
Tracy Grimshaw is an Australian journalist and television presenter.
Barbie of Swan Lake is a 2003 animated fantasy film co-produced by Mainframe Entertainment and Mattel Entertainment, and distributed by Artisan Home Entertainment.
The Nottingham Post is an English tabloid newspaper which serves Nottingham, Nottinghamshire and parts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire.
"The Robber Bridegroom" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 40. Joseph Jacobs included a variant, Mr Fox, in English Fairy Tales, but the original provenance is much older; Shakespeare alludes to the Mr. Fox variant in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1:
Beth Webb is a British author of books for children and teenagers. She has written fifteen books, including the Star Dancer tetralogy, a fantasy series published by Macmillan, as well as the Fleabag Trilogy. She is also the co-founder of Books Beyond Words, and has illustrated more than twenty titles for adults with learning disabilities. She lives in Somerset, near Glastonbury Tor.
WAGs is an acronym used to refer to wives and girlfriends of high-profile sportsmen and women. The term may also be used in the singular form, WAG, to refer to a specific female partner or life partner who is in a relationship with an athlete. The term was first used by the British tabloid press to refer to the wives and girlfriends of high-profile footballers, originally the England national football team. The WAGs acronym came about following an increasing focus on the coverage of athletes' partners in the late-20th century, and it came into common use during the 2006 FIFA World Cup to refer to Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole, although the term had been used occasionally before that.
Mary Janice Rule was an American actress and psychotherapist, earning her PhD while still acting, then acting occasionally while working in her new profession.
Carole Morin is a Glasgow-born novelist who lives in Soho, London. She has had five novels published: Lampshades, Penniless in Park Lane, Dead Glamorous, Spying on Strange Men and Fleshworld.
Anne Yvonne Gilbert is a British artist and book illustrator. Her cover design of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 1983 single "Relax" has been described as "one of the most famous record sleeves of all time". While much of her career since then has focused on illustrating the covers and interiors of popular books, Gilbert has also designed series of stamps produced by the Royal Mail depicting Christmas themes and Arthurian mythology. She illustrated several of the books in the Ologies series, among other children's books.
Detective Sergeant/Detective Inspector Logan "Lazarus" McRae is the protagonist of a series of detective novels by Scottish crime writer Stuart MacBride, first introduced in 2005's Cold Granite. He is an officer of the Aberdeen police force.
The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. It is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). The novel is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel; Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada.