The Real Housewives of London Recap: Life’s a Witch

The Real Housewives of London
Fifty Shades of Red / Alcohol & Ozempic / White Witches and Warm Champagne
Season 1 Episodes 4 - 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Panthea Parker is telling on herself again. Minutes after telling Karen in a Sprinter van that she’s not a lady and refuting Karen’s characterization that she spoke ill of her, they are sitting down listening to the strains of the electric violin. Panthea is saying that all of her friends in Jersey sent her “Texas” (which is Panthea for “texts”), saying that Karen is not of the same class and caliber as Panthea. Oh, got it. So she did mean that Karen was low class when she said she wasn’t a lady. Got it. Karen has a great comeback, which is to show everyone that she and her husband have been invited for afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace with Princess Anne, voted Royal We’d Most Like to Share a Cigarette and Talk Shit With by Brian Moylan Magazine. In her confessional, Panthea says that anyone can buy their way into the palace, but for the garden party she is going to, attendees must be invited because of work they do for the community. She says, “And I’m invited.” Correction. Your husband is invited. He is the one who does things for the community, and you are just a plus-one. Yes, every marriage is a partnership, but what has Panthea done for the community rather than tear it apart? Even worse, when she is at the garden party and insists on getting her “selfie” with the king, she keeps saying, “God bless the King. God bless Camilla.” It’s God save the King. Like in the anthem. It’s on the citizenship exam for the king’s sake.

For those of you who have been watching in real time, this all may seem like old news. Due to the vagaries of Bravo scheduling, they’re now airing two episodes of RHOL each week, which I missed last week, so I only recapped one episode. That’s why this week we’re doing episodes four through six and then two episodes per recap for the final two weeks. With the housekeeping out of the way (don’t worry, I’m still wearing my French-maid outfit), we have to look at the two conflicts that are animating this trio of episodes. The first is Panthea versus Karen. After their blow-up at the all-red dinner, Karen apologizes for calling her a narcissist (never apologize for telling facts, Karen), and Panthea apologizes for saying she’s not a lady. They hug it out and are all made up.

Then Karen does something weird. Panthea goes back to London early, and Karen is at dinner with the rest of the ladies and brings up Panthea to see if anyone will talk shit about her. Then, after a lovely day, she goes home and posts a weird Instagram Story, something about putting bait out for fish and catching people in a trap, and it’s all set to a Bob Marley song title, “Hypocrites.” I don’t get it. She later explains that after she and Panthea made up, people didn’t seem that glad that they were getting along. She wanted to see who in the group would talk shit about Panthea when she brought her name up and thought that Juliet and Amanda took the bait and weren’t nice about her. Then she got mad at everyone for not being nice about Panthea. 

I don’t get what game Karen is playing. She was mad at her in the morning, and suddenly she’s defending her honor and making sure that everyone isn’t talking shit? Also, she didn’t say anything to the women’s faces. Even when she explains what she meant to Amanda, she never calls Amanda out for not being as complimentary to Panthea as Karen expected. She had this whole dinner, hung out with them at home, and posted the Instagram Story but still won’t talk about it? It’s odder than a prime number (other than 2). It is a repetition of when Karen went to Panthea’s house; she didn’t like how she treated her, and she waited until they were deep into their next dinner to call her a “narcissist.” Karen is welcome to her feelings, of course, but how is anyone supposed to know what they are if she won’t express them? How is she going to be so pass agg (which is how English people say “passive aggressive”) to post a weird but critical Insta Story and then never talk about it again? I don’t get it. 

Panthea and Karen’s peace is tentative. When they all go to Henley for Juliet’s picnic, Panthea immediately starts asking where Jeremy, Karen’s husband, is. Panthea says that Karen said he was coming, then he’s not coming, and then he is coming after all. She’s grilling her on setting a date when she can see him. Why does Panthea care? This is what I hate about her. She’s pretending it’s because she wants to get to know Karen and her husband, but she’s just looking for a reason to blast Karen about something else. Karen has a great read on Panthea and says, “You think the world is against you and you’re against yourself.” Exactly. Panthea acts in these terrible ways when she has her mind made up about someone and then gets upset when they react to her, as if they’re out to get her. It’s like when she goes to the doctor, convinced she’s perimenopausal and the doctor tells her that she probably isn’t. She gets mad at the doctor, as if it’s his fault that she doesn’t have a condition she thinks she does. 

At the picnic, Panthea tells Karen all of her friends are actually in Jersey, not in London, and Karen says that she’s in both, and then Panthea says she moved from Birmingham to Jersey and Karen corrects her, getting exasperated that Panthea doesn’t really listen and makes accusations without having her facts straight. Panthea then gets angry at Karen, saying that Karen is jealous of her and her relationship with her husband. According to Panthea, the reason Jeremy isn’t there is that he can’t stand being around his wife. Based on what, sister? You haven’t even met this man, which is what you’re so upset about, and now you’re saying he can’t stand his wife. Take every single seat, take them all to Wembley, and build yourself a stadium that none of us will ever go to because we don’t want to see the Kenny G concerts that you’re programming at the fucking Pantheadome. 

I can’t even care about this fight anymore because we have a real, classic Housewives feud happening right before our eyes and it is fantastic. It all starts when Caroline Stanbury drags the reanimated corpse of Juliet Angus from Ladies of London Original Recipe to this here reality show. (We will henceforth be calling her “Angus” to differentiate from Juliet Mayhew, who is the original, so she will be “Juliet.”) Angus tells Caroline and Juliet that she and Amanda have preexisting issues. According to Angus, they were great friends during lockdown, and then Amanda became good friends with another of Angus’s friends. When those two had a falling out, Amanda thought Angus didn’t have her back and sent her a text saying, “Your friendship means nothing to me,” and they haven’t spoken in almost a year.

Angus swans into Juliet’s picnic in a blue flowy dress, cowboy boots, a bag that doesn’t match, and Gloria Steinem sunglasses. It is the worst outfit we have seen on this show so far, and that includes the moth-infested fascinator Panthea wore to meet the king. The only thing worse is Amanda’s giant hat that is squishing her ears like it’s trying to turn them into waffles. Angus sits right across from Amanda, who didn’t know she was attending, and this show immediately turns into Real Housewives. Juliet says they were best friends. Amanda says she is lying and that Angus had never been to her house or met her daughter. Angus says that’s not true; what about that time she came to her house to return the dresses she borrowed? Amanda says that makes sense because she was always borrowing her clothes. It’s a petty off, and no one is winning. Correction. The only ones winning are all of us because I live for petty. I’m changing my title from Dame to Petty Officer.

The culmination of the fight is when Amanda asks Angus how the alcohol is going for her. Angus asks how the Ozempic is going for her. Amanda says, “Pretty good. I lost eight kilos. Highly recommend it.” Bam! Instant icon. Own your shit, sister, shut it down, and defang anything she has to say. This is how you do Housewives. Then Angus says that everyone was right about Amanda, that they call her “the White Witch.” Panthea pipes up to say she heard this, too, because, if there is going to be a bitchy rumor going around, then Panthea wants it known that she has at least a 10 percent stake in it. Everyone says that’s low but, honestly, I can see it. She is giving post-transition Gandolf. I wish people would call me the White Witch. It means she’s beautiful, powerful, wears great clothes, no one fucks with her, and she looks so damn young that she’s probably doing it by magic. Also, we all know that white magic is good magic.

Amanda retaliates by saying she “heard” that Juliet is an alcoholic with no money whose husband is about to divorce her. Juliet Angus says all of this is fake. When we see a scene with her husband, Gregor, they do seem happy, and Gregor is shockingly cuter, funnier, and (hopefully) richer than the last time we laid eyes on him. At the picnic, Amanda and Angus separate and Angus goes off to complain about Amanda to the rest of the cast while Amanda sits alone, trying to keep her ears from being ejected from her skull. Nessie eventually comes over, and Amanda explains her side of the story: that she didn’t think Angus was putting effort into the relationship, that they weren’t seeing each other that much, and she felt like Angus left her for different friends. She then tells Nessie, “You can’t come at a Christian woman with sorcery and witchery.” OMG. I’m not going to ask what year it is, but what century. Does Amanda think it’s 1592? Is she afraid of being burned at the stake? 

What’s great about this fight is I can see that they’re both right and they’re both wrong. Angus says that Amanda started to ask her to promote her skin-care brand too much, which rubbed her the wrong way and made her pull back. Amanda says that Angus pulled back, and that is why she didn’t want to be friends with her anymore. Amanda thinks that Angus should have had her back more, and Angus thinks the fight between Amanda and this other friend (cast her for season two!) is their own business. I get it. I get it all. I don’t know that there is a culprit here. 

What it has exposed, however, is how ruthless Amanda can be. She has lunch with Juliet and their dogs, which both have managers and fashion careers, and gets upset that Juliet didn’t take her side. She thinks Juliet is a shitty host for leaving her alone, which is true. Amanda also says that everything she said about Angus was true and that she is incapable of lying. Girl. Be for real for even a second. We know that’s not true. They were both being extreme, and there was definitely some fibbing and making up stories going on there. The side of Amanda we haven’t seen before, one that her swift amputation of Angus illustrated, is how if you are not with Amanda you are against her. She tells Juliet that they can’t be friends anymore because she’s friends with Angus. She says, “You chose your side, so off, you.” With that, she waved her finger in a circle; she twitched her nose; she brewed a bunch of herbs in a cauldron and ran her open palm over the steaming mixture. She pulled all of her fingers and thumb together to a fine point and then released them all quickly, saying, “Poof,” and Juliet was gone, and a whiff of smoke curled up from her chair. The White Witch struck again.