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Disclaimer: all non-league footballers, characters, and incidents portrayed in this article are purely fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred. Jamie Vardy is not fictitious, however. He is a footballer with Leicester City, and has an established history of calling people absolute full-kit wankers.On the cheap leather sofa at the back of the studio, there sits a footballer. He is quietly sobbing, and his tears are staining his Folkestone Invicta shirt. He has just found out that his wife has been cheating on him, and that a DNA test has proven all three of his children are in fact the progeny of a 39-year-old centre back currently playing for Hemel Hempstead. As a camera pans in towards his grief-stricken features, a soft and sinister voice suddenly says: "Your wife never loved you, Darren. How does that make you feel?"This is the voice of Jamie Vardy, host of gritty new reality TV show Jamie Vardy's Having An Academy. According to the Sun, a show of that (frankly appalling) name is currently in production. The programme will see the former Stocksbridge Park Steels star act as a personal guru to 42 non-league footballers in an attempt to unearth the next undiscovered lower-league gem. That's the current format, anyway. When the producers realise that non-league football really isn't that lucrative a premise, we reckon it'll end up being more like a crossover between Soccer Saturday and The Jeremy Kyle Show.Here's how we hope the show pans out. We want to see Jamie Vardy acting as a sympathetic agony aunt one moment, a polemical moral arbiter the next. We want to see Jamie Vardy cooing over the lost souls of non-league, before lambasting them for their crippling dependence on protein shakes and excoriating them for going to Vodka Revs after Thursday night training sessions. We want to see Jamie Vardy demeaning grown men on live television, reducing them to tears by calling them "absolute full-kit wankers" as opposed to actual footballers."So let me get this straight, Keith. You missed your side's play-off final against Gosport Borough, so you could sleep with YOUR WIFE'S BEST MATE?" These are the sort of lines we want to hear on Jamie Vardy's Having An Academy. We will gasp, we will splutter, we will cry out in indignation at the filthy underbelly of non-league football. We want the most prurient, invasive insights we can possibly get into the sex lives of the Margate reserve team, and we want to feast upon the transient vindication it gives us when thinking of our own fathomless depravity. We want to hear tales of alcopop addiction, of excessive popper usage, of non-league footballers who've alienated their teammates by their absolute insistence on playing Chumbawamba's Greatest Hits from start to finish before every match.More than anything, we want Jamie Vardy to preside over this carnival of debauchery. We want him to reveal lie detector results off laminated cue cards, dropping the bombshell that three Tonbridge Angels players missed the entirety of pre-season to go on a lads' holiday to Zante. We want to see a non-league reject declare his dream of becoming "the next Sylvan Ebanks-Blake", as Jamie Vardy offers to help him kick his terrible hippy crack habit.These are our demands for Jamie Vardy's Having An Academy. Let's face it, nobody wants to watch a programme about non-league success stories. Give the people what they want; give the public the nihilistic daytime television they truly crave. Show them an academy of human misery, and let Jamie Vardy feast on their fear.
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