Emma Cowing: In a lather over Ritchie role in Madonna soap

DO YOU remember the tremendous hoo-ha when Madonna and Guy Ritchie married at Skibo Castle all those years ago?

Such was the hype, you’d have thought no-one in Scotland had ever got hitched before.

Long before Twitter, Facebook and even rolling news was commonplace, the inch-by-inch coverage of the “wedding of the century” in December 2000 was as unavoidable as George Osborne’s smirk, as every news crew in the western hemisphere decamped to the wilds of Dornoch to report on the length of Madonna’s hemline and other such crucial matters. Even now, 11 years on and three years after the happy couple decided they weren’t so happy after all, theirs is still held up as the benchmark “Scottish castle wedding” in bridal magazines and websites across the world.

Which is all a bit unfortunate given that Ritchie has finally decided to spill a few beans on the reality of his marriage to the world’s most famous woman, and has been less than complimentary. In an interview in Details magazine, he said: “I enjoyed my first marriage. It’s definitely not something I regret.” Talk about damned by faint praise. But that’s not the worst of it. “I stepped into a soap opera,” he continued. “And I lived in it for quite a long time.”

Now I’m not a soap opera fan myself – the only one I ever seem to catch is The Archers, which is forever referencing things that happened 25 years ago round the back of a cowshed involving characters I’ve never heard of – but if I were to speculate, I’d say he’s talking about one of those big, American-style soaps involving dramatic women with breathy voices and hairdos the size of a small West African country rather than, say, Emmerdale.

Not that this should be any surprise, of course. I can’t say I’ve ever imagined Madonna’s life to be a sort of calm and peaceful oasis where everyone discusses things rationally, thinks before they speak and apologises if they get a bit cross. It’s Madonna for goodness sake. The woman wore a cone-shaped bra and made a pop video about sleeping with Jesus. Lisa Dingle, she isn’t.

Madonna is, was, and – apart from those few years when she was a small child – pretty much always has been an exceptionally powerful woman. She has been commanding stadiums since barely out of her teens, runs several record and fashion labels, and is generally understood to be utterly subsumed in the full-time business of Being Madonna.

Ritchie, of course, knew all this when he married her, and I do wonder whether he took a role in this “soap opera” merely because he liked the challenge. Being the man to domesticate Madonna (remember when she went around wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend “Mrs Ritchie”?), is, I suspect, something that someone like Ritchie – an unreconstituted “bloke” who affects a South London hard-man accent despite being the son of a well to-do former army captain – would find impossibly alluring.

IF YOU really want to turn your life into a soap however, then talking about your marriage in public is an excellent way to do it. Both Ritchie and Madonna have moved on – he has had a child with girlfriend Jacqui Ainsley and Madonna is currently in a relationship with a 24-year-old and has adopted another child – and frankly, so have the rest of us. There was no need for Ritchie to pipe up about his marriage now, particularly when his children with Madonna are still young. It’s almost as if he had a new film to promote.

Celebrities are as entitled to privacy as anyone else, but when they choose to play out such significant moments of their lives in the public eye, whether it be their wedding day or lifting the lid on their marriage secrets, how can they expect it to take on anything other than a soap operatic quality?

Madonna is unlikely to be pleased Ritchie has spoken publicly about their relationship. The marriage may be over, but I’m sure, if you listen closely, you can probably just about hear the noise of his guts being turned into garters. Now wouldn’t that make for an excellent plotline in a soap opera?