‘Victoria Beckham’: All posh, and no spice

If you wish to spend an eighth of your day watching Victoria Beckham convince you that Victoria Beckham, contrary to popular belief, does not think the world revolves around Victoria Beckham — then you’d quite fancy her new three-part docu-series, conspicuously titled ‘Victoria Beckham’.

It introduces itself like many celebrity vanity projects: a montage of the press dissecting the Posh Spice-turned-footballer’s wife-turned-fashion mogul.

As Beckham joins the ranks of Jennifer Lopez (‘The Greatest Love Story Never Told’), Lady Gaga (‘Five Foot Two’), and her husband, David Beckham (‘Beckham’), it makes you wonder if childhood sob stories filmed in poorly-lit mansions are the latest celebrity fad, right up there with Ozempic and “wellness” brands.

The story (barely) traces her life, told with the curatorial prowess of a Vogue spread. Running parallel, cameras follow the chiselled-face mystery as she gears up for the biggest show of her brand — named (you guessed it) Victoria Beckham.

As she walks into her atelier in the first episode, greeting an employee with a “How are you, you inspired my outfit today” — in her trademark cadence that doesn’t ever reveal if she is earnest, or just really good at making fun of you — it’s impossible not to recall the viral clip from her husband’s docu-series. There, she attempts to tell her “working-class upbringing” story until David interrupts, questioning what car her dad drove.

“A Rolls-Royce,” she admits, begrudgingly.

That single clip threatens to unravel every strained attempt by ‘Victoria Beckham’ to paint the icon as “different” or “peculiar”.

Anecdotes fall miserably flat. She recalls how her Spice Girls bandmates didn’t care for fashion, leaving a “nice budget” to her — before cutting to archival footage of a fellow Spice Girl lamenting how she only got a “£20 thing”, while Victoria went to Gucci. You almost expect Netflix to cut in with a “for legal reasons, this is a joke”.

Cameos by Anna Wintour, Tom Ford and Donatella Versace add little — to portray fashion’s upper clergy this bland is, ironically, a design achievement. To her credit, if anyone fits the bill for the glossy celebrity confessional, it’s Mrs Posh Spice herself.

The series extends the persona that the young girl from Hertfordshire spent decades perfecting — lethal poses and surgical one-liners tucked behind a marquee pout, cementing her place as pop-culture royalty: “I’m smiling on the inside. (But) I feel I have a responsibility to the fashion community,” Beckham once joked.

Unlike most self-mythologising documentaries by red-carpet aficionados, ‘Victoria Beckham’ never even attempts to dance on the edge of self-parody.

It doesn’t mock its subject — it mocks you, the viewer, as Victoria grins from a dimly-lit corner of her palace (only on the inside, of course; lest we forget her responsibility to fashion!).

In a world growing closer and closer to a dystopian novel, we often turn to the absurd comforts of the dumpster fire with a pink bow that is reality TV — the wardrobe tantrums of ‘The Kardashians’, the mohalla-aunty-level brawls of ‘Bigg Boss’, the rare schadenfreude of watching rich people cry.

But ‘Victoria Beckham’, in all its high-gloss genius, serves you virtually none of that. In that sense, it is high fashion. It is performance art. It is camp. It is quintessentially Victoria Beckham.

And sadly — or perfectly — much of it is about as watchable as most performance art.