Real Housewives of Orange County: Backed up in Britain

“The Real Housewives of Orange County” are in London, and they are constipated.

Now, normally, we might not address such delicate, private matters — but delicate and private aren’t exactly the adjectives one finds before the names of Tamra Judge and Emily Simpson, who, on a quest for sweet relief, pop round to an outdoor juice bar near their London hotel.

“Can I do the beet cleanse? Can you add extra cleanse?” Emily asks the juice barista.

“Like a laxative?” Tamra helpfully offers.

“Whatever you’ve got back there, that will get me moving,” Emily adds.

This, near the end of the episode, is definitely a healthier option than the desperate measures Heather Dubrow was considering as it began.

“There’s a place called Mayfair Chippy for fish and chips,” she shouts down the hallway of the hotel suite to Tamra. “That’s going to make us (um, go).”

Maybe our housewives aren’t staying hydrated on this trip?

This episode, the second in a three-week arc that takes place in London, features most of what you get when they are back home in Orange County: Nights out in fancy restaurants to eat filet mignon and onion rings, drinks in the bar after dinners, and dancing in their undergarments in their rooms ’til the cows come home.

Filet mignon, onion rings, and a scene where Emily eats her room-service bacon by dipping it, bite by bite, into a ramekin of mayonnaise. Gosh, if only we could figure out what’s going on with their digestive systems.

But at least there’s the usual yelling at each over slights real and imaginary. When it comes to that, absolutely everything is still moving smoothly.

The second day of the London trip, hosted by Shannon Storms Beador, starts quietly.

Tamra and Katie Ginella hit the hotel spa, as do Gina Kirschenheiter and Jenn Pedranti. Heather goes to visit Shannon, who is looking askance at Emily’s mayo-bacon bites.

Heather apologizes for her fight with Shannon over dinner the previous night. When the conversation turns to the lawsuit filed against Shannon by her ex-boyfriend John Janssen, Shannon pops up from the breakfast table.

“You know what? I’m going to get my papers,” she tells the other two as she leaves for her bedroom. When she returns she is holding a fistful of sheets of notebook paper, ragged ends where they were torn out of a spiral notebook, one which she has calculated to the penny the amount she says she spent on John.

As she goes on, waving her scraps of paper for emphasis, Heather and Emily are losing it. Heather pulls her sweater up over her face to hide her laughter. Emily is doubled over, her head almost on the table next to that sweet, sweet ramekin of mayonnaise.

“I’m glad you find humor in it,” she sniffs after finally noticing her friends gasping for air between guffaws.

“Do you know what Excel is, Shannon?” Emily asks. Then to the camera: “This woman’s waving around a notepad that looks like it came out of my kid’s backpack.”

Heather is laughing in the confessional she filmed long after the moment: “This is why, even when I’m annoyed with her, I can’t really be mad, because” – she pauses, holds her arms out and shrugs – “that’s Shannon!”

But that storyline pales this week in comparison to the furor involving the $2,000 Dress.

Jenn, poor Jenn — literally and figuratively —cannot catch a break from her wealthier housewife friends. Not that Jenn is broke but it’s an expensive lifestyle and keeping up with the Dubrows is a desperate game.

At the tea party Shannon threw for her birthday before the London trip, Jenn showed up in a lovely floral print dress. How lovely? Heather knows. While walking through Neiman Marcus, Heather saw Jenn’s Dolce & Gabbana dress and checked the price tag — who wouldn’t? — and saw that it cost $2,000.

And then she spread the news, texting Tamra, who told Gina, who told Katie, and on and on and on. Jenn takes it relatively well at dinner that night. She calls Heather and Tamra on the carpet and they apologize.

The next day, though, Shannon shows Jenn a text from Tamra two years earlier, in which she said she was going to get a background check done on Jenn’s boyfriend Ryan and Jenn goes off.

“Putting this (stuff) out there, it’s almost like weird and obsessive,” Jenn tells Shannon and Gina.

“

And off she goes to confront Tamra.

“You did a (bleepin’) background check on Ryan?” she yells at Tamra, who, with Heather, is getting her hair and makeup done for the day.

“No. What are you talking about?” Tamra replies.

“You did!”

“No, I swear on my kids’ lives I did not,” Tamra says.

Not two minutes later, Tamra crumbles under Jenn’s verbal assault by insisting all she had done was ask a friend to check whether Ryan was a licensed mortgage broker as he had claimed, and that’s not a background check.

Phew. I need a juice after all that. Any idea what might cleanse this from my brain?