Every superstar wants to be “relatable” these days. But I don’t know if I want my stars to be relatable.
I don’t want to see Victoria Beckham in the gym or chatting over coffee in the kitchen. I want to see her in a rocket to space. I don’t want to see her showing me how to achieve her trademark “smoky eye” on Instagram. No, I want to see the robot or talking bluebird that usually does her make-up.
And I want to see my celebrities descend a staircase in a ball gown before beating an impudent footman with a silver cane. I want to see them chugging down panda meat with a goblet of dolphin tears.
I want to see them don a pith helmet and jodhpurs before travelling by Zeppelin to watch a bear fight a man on Henry Kissinger’s yacht. (Kissinger is only dead for the little people.)
We already have Great House Revival. What we need now is Feck the Preservation Order, Let’s Knock It and Build an Office Block
The Celebrity Traitors is clearly ripped off from Traitors Ireland: A Nation Once Again
Today I will discuss House of Beamish. I think I remember the plot from history class, but we were all quite drunk
The Morning Show is just like real life. Who hasn’t slept with a tech billionaire?
I don’t want my celebrities to have had boring fillers and Botox done, like mere middle-class people. No, I want them to be entirely smooth, like a bowling ball, sanded down entirely, no nose, no ears, entirely hairless, floating in a vat of brine and communicating via telepathy or something Elon Musk has implanted in their brains.
I want them to say, “You grew up in Kildare? What a coincidence! I own Kildare.”
I want them to say, “Where do you keep your horses? What of your ocelot? Have you ever killed a centaur?”
I want them to say, “Come, child, let us take the secret underground rich-people tunnel that goes straight to the airport, which I also own.”
I don’t want my celebrities to use tax-avoidance schemes. No, I want them to be completely ignorant of the very concept of tax. I want them to look confused when I say words such as “tax” or indeed words such as “funeral”. I want my celebrities to say things like “What is death?” before uploading to the data centre that’s melting the world’s last iceberg.
And I don’t want them to care remotely what I think. In fact, I want them to have had an operation whereby they cannot even perceive people below a certain income level.
Sadly, however, we live in a world where celebrities really do care what we think. Because of the attention economy, they feel they must debase themselves before us for relevance. This is why we live in a glut of celebrity documentaries commissioned and made by the celebrities themselves.
Victoria Beckham has just produced another such series for Netflix. The template for this was established by her husband, the commodified Lego footballman David Beckham. He turns up here grizzled, tattooed and bestubbled and yet somehow still with the voice of a small child, like in a Haribo ad.
Like David’s documentary, this one features plenty of footage of the duo bantering casually over the kitchen island. “We are just regular folk,” they seem to say, doing so in English instead of the secret rich-person language they certainly use when we’re not watching. “Do we not have a kitchen island like you losers at home (and also a literal island)?”
What David Beckham’s documentary series had going for it is that his job is impressively ridiculous. After millions of years of evolution Beckham has acquired the skill to accurately punt an inflated sphere into a net while other men try to stop him.
Whatever you say about a culture that celebrates this skill above all else, it is, at least, fun to look at. “Huzzah! The sportsman hoofed that orb splendidly, and now it is encased in a suspended mesh!” I cry, fitting in perfectly with the regular football fans.
Victoria has taken a different route, however. She was once in the lucrative pop combo the Spice Girls, alongside Ginger, Baby, Sporty, Scary, Sleepy, Sneezy, Dozy etc. A show about the Spice Girls would be fun to watch. Sadly, Victoria has left her former profession behind in order to go into the rag trade. She has, I believe, some sort of stall down the market.
You see, in order to justify the undue wealth and luxury in which they live, contemporary rich people must perpetuate the myth of meritocracy by acting like joyless workaholics. This wasn’t a problem when wealth was just something you were born with thanks to your best friend, God.
And so it is that over three long episodes Victoria must convince us that she works hard at a really boring job. By the end of it I totally believe her. Oh God is her job boring. We see her at meetings. We see her at model dressings. We hear her hand-wringing about success and failure. We see her look at weather reports.
The series follows that documentary shtick whereby we learn the story of Posh Spice’s life interspersed with a present-day challenge: her new clothing line is about to launch after a period of financial instability. (This is glossed over a little bit, but we do learn that she spent £70,000 a year on plants for her office; this actually feels low to me.)
We are asked to share this sense of jeopardy. “What if Victoria Beckham has a minor setback?” we cry in anguish, gnawing our fingernails. “What if Victoria Beckham has nowt but her riches to comfort her? What if Victoria Beckham’s children have fewer humidors for their cigars? What if, amid the stress, David Beckham’s voice finally breaks and he sounds like Metatron, the voice of God?”
There are talking heads. The formidable Vogue editor Anna Wintour gives her advice. “Don’t look left, don’t look right, just be who you are,” she says, which is great advice for the fashion business but not so great for, say, crossing the road.
Other fashionistas, such as Donatella (one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) Versace, Tom Ford (a stiff, elegant action figure of a man) and Eva Longoria (Victoria’s relatable best friend), talk about what she has achieved in the world of fashion. I do not doubt it. It’s just not particularly fun to watch.
Shallow ideas of authenticity and an unreasonable fetish for hard work lead to dull, overlong and inauthentic artefacts like this. There’s definitely a fascinating documentary to be made about the Beckham family by a journalist with a real budget and complete creative control.
In that film I imagine the dynasty would emerge as the gloriously and authentically out-of-touch space cadets they actually are. They should embrace it. Now that they’ve got two glossy and expensive pieces of propaganda out of their system, perhaps that’ll be their next move.
Authenticity is a strange thing. Slow Horses, currently on series five over on Apple TV+, is based on an entirely fictional series of novels by Mick Herron, yet it feels oddly real when put alongside similar small-screen dramas or, indeed, the Victoria Beckham documentary series.
Funny, gripping and tautly written by its showrunner, Will Smith, the show also has, in Gary Oldman’s dishevelled and profane spy-handler Jackson Lamb, the first TV character I can smell through the screen. It’s not the kind of authenticity I imagine Victoria Beckham is going for. But who knows where life will take her.
[ Laura Slattery: Slow Horses is back, and its budget is showingOpens in new window ]
