Annette Sharp: The Real Housewives of Sydney are overdue for a reality check

IF ONLY the preening, backstabbing women in The Real Housewives of Sydney were the exception rather than the rule in our great harbour city, Annette Sharp writes.

IF ONLY the preening, backstabbing women in The Real Housewives of Sydney were the exception rather than the rule in Sydney.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the seven women contracted to the new franchise of the popular show, a spin-off of a 2006 program called The Real Housewives Of Orange County, are the products of a television machine inclined to dial the ugly up to 11 to achieve maximum TV ratings.

But the truth is you don’t have to look very hard in Sydney to find a growing legion of women every bit as spoilt, entitled and badly behaved as Lisa Oldfield, Victoria Rees, Krissy Marsh, Nicole O’Neill, Matty Samaei, Melissa Tkautz and AthenaX, aka The Real Housewives of Sydney (RHOS).

In the first two episodes of the reality show, these seven women quickly set the tone and emerged as something like post-menopausal gangster molls replete with guns, loot and mouths one shouldn’t kiss a mother with.

The cast of The Real Housewives of Sydney. Picture: Ben Symons

Within 86 minutes the women were deliberately destroying each other’s property (Rees), viciously insulting each other (Oldfield, Rees, Marsh and Samaei), calling their own preschool-aged children “dickhead” (Oldfield) and pampering themselves relentlessly (Oldfield, Samaei and Rees) while battling to keep their eyes open for the cameras under voluminous false eyelashes (Tkautz), bunging on grating upper-class accents, and guzzling champagne and “skinny bitch” cocktails (all).

While some of this was undoubtedly engineered for the television cameras, the unscripted program looks to be a faithful depiction of these women’s true natures.

How else to explain the plainly batty AthenaX Levendi, whose husband Panos informed journalists at the program launch that he was married to “the mad one”.

Candidates for the show were not hard for TV producers to find in Sydney, a city full of colourful characters with high- maintenance wives.

There are thousands of women in this city eager to be discovered, paid and anointed the next Roxy Jacenko, heaven forbid.

The rumoured $100,000 a season payment fee appealed to many.

Melissa Tkautz, Nicole O’Neill, Matty Samaei, AthenaX Levendi, Lisa Oldfield, Krissy Marsh and Victoria Rees have debuted as The Real Housewives of Sydney. Picture: Christian Gilles

Among those left disappointed after failing to make the line-up were fashion designer Charlie Brown and the ex-wife of TV legend Mike Willesee, make-up artist Gordana Willesee.

Skye Leckie could have been one of the ‘Real Housewives’.

Sydney uber-socialite Skye Leckie was in talks with producers but it seems her irascible husband, ex-Seven Network CEO David Leckie, wasn’t all that keen on the idea of sitting in the back of establishing shots cheering his “Skysie” on.

A great shame, it would have been unmissable television and served as a nice counterpoint to the real-life Seven Network Tim Worner scandal.

Just as Gina Liano emerged as the alpha in the Melbourne version of the show, three alphas have quickly emerged from the pack in Sydney.

These are Oldfield, Rees and Marsh — each a formidable, if not shrewish, firebrand, although none what one might consider a stereotypical “housewife”.

After only two episodes the Sydney women are already at each other’s throats, marking this program as more aggressive and brutal than its Melbourne equivalent — which somewhat accurately reflects Sydney-Melbourne business paradigms.

The women of Sydney are plainly as vain and plastic as the women of Melbourne but they seem, in general, smarter and funnier — although also more vicious and utterly disloyal to one another.

While the battlelines are only just being established, Sydney women will see themselves or someone they know in these seven characters — a colleague, a best friend, a sister, oneself.

In a week in which women and the achievements of women have been in sharp focus internationally, it’s a mirror worth holding up for examination — and one that will hopefully hasten some overdue reality checks locally.