Victoria Beckham - Netflix

[monicagellerbing]

Anyone seen this? I’ve always liked VB and did enjoy this insight into her fashion business but I did find when she was talking about how she nearly lost the business I lost some sympathy. I have no doubt it was stressful but having a millionaire husband to bail you out isn’t the same as what other people deal with when they lose a business and I thought it was a bit tone deaf of her to be sat crying about it when there’s a COL crisis!

Harper is turning out to be a lovely young lady and seemed to have a nice relationship with both V and D.

It’s the whole family that tolerates it - his kids will without doubt be aware of his numerous affairs and one wonders how it messes with your head having to pretend happy families as a child. Clearly Brooklyn not willing to any longer.

Maybe it’s not Harry or Brooklyn that are the problem - they’ve voted with their feet as they don’t feel comfortable in their family of origin. Painful but fair enough.

I remember reading - very many years ago - an article saying that her weight at the time would result in her life expectancy being in her 60's.

For full disclosure, I admit I have never been a fan, simply, really, because I just don't really get impressed by the things they have pursued (never thought much of the Spice Girls, not a football fan, have ZERO comprehension of just wanting to "be famous." I also don't really warm to their "styling": the botox, the sarong, the tats ... ) So to me they have never been aspirational.

But watching it (so far; again, for full disclosure, I have to admit I haven't got much into episode 2 so I'm clearly not loving it loving it) I actually don't entirely agree with some of the criticism on here - to my surprise in fact.

DB has always struck me as a very vain, superficial man, so I could easily have believed the comments about him being dismissive of VB. But actually I think for me what came across was something approaching a real respect for her. He clearly was besotted with her at the outset and I think the fact that he seems to have moved through that to something a little more substantive actually shows he feels MORE for her than I might have expected him to. He genuinely seems proud of things like her wanting "to prove people wrong - quietly." It is the kind of compliment I didn't really expect from him.

I also grasped - a little - what drove VB, in particular, to be so fame hungry. The backstory of her being bullied at school, the ambition (pressure?) placed on her by her parents and, actually, the performance streak in her as a young girl that was based on something much deeper in her in an expressive way than I had expected sort of gave me a glimpse of how she came to be a fame-chaser, and it was a little less shallow than I had expected. I was just thinking all this at the moment when Roland put it really well in saying something about fame being a way of not being obliterated by bullying or the failure on the performance front she had dreamed of as a child.

I haven't finished watching it, and may not, but I have come away with an impression of a type of bravery in her that her public persona belied.

For me it’s desperately sad that she is permanently preoccupied with external validation - chasing the approval of ‘the general public’ - it’s both relentless and ultimately futile. I don’t see it as brave - just sadly not very emotionally intelligent with limited self reflection and insight. She could really do with some decent therapy.

I'm not in a debate with you, I'm simply calling out your stupid comments.

Yes it is also sad, you are right.

But I sort of understood it as something more/deeper than just "look at me!" which I could never wrap my head around. I think she actually did genuinely seem to have a creative/expressive bent, which had never really been apparent to me from Spice Girls! It was awful the bit about being told she was too fat to dance - and you can see why the obsession with undereating might manifest. And the fashion thing seemed to me to be more a rechannelling of some of that creative expression, rather then a random way to stay current.

They weren't stupid or misogynistic. You disagreed with me but you're incapable of doing so without resorting to insults.

I’m reading a book at the minute about them both and what I really don’t like about Victoria is the way her scammy life betrays other women.
I can have a career and 4 children - despite having numerous Nannie’s and grandparents on the payroll
i can have 4 children and still be really thin - yes because she lives a miserable existence eating nothing tasty
i have a fabulous marriage - no she doesn’t he is a serial adulterer.
she betrays other women with the lies she tries to portray, we can all see through it and it’s why she will never be popular

I suppose that, like others on here, I don’t like the way she colludes with the idea that very thin is best. Unless she actually has an eating disorder - in which case it isn’t her fault and she needs treatment for a serious mental health condition.

There's an article about them today. In the photo, she's draped over him, and he has his arms folded as though he can't wait for her to get off him.

All their toadying paid off. They are now Lord and Lady Beckham.

No, he’s Sir and she can use the title Lady as long as she’s married to him (which I’m pretty sure she will). He’s certainly not a Lord, and hopefully never will be.

No I don't like that either.

And I keep thinking what a powerful role model she could be (for her audience) if she just came out and said stuff it, I want to be healthy and I'm done caring how I look to that extent.

She definitely has an eating disorder, she has a phobia of gaining weight and restricts what she eats to an unhealthy degree. My dd has an ED and I recognise a lot of the behaviours in VB, it’s depressing that she has all the money and could have paid for treatment but instead has spent money on clothes for other anorexics.

Living with someone with an ED is very difficult and not dissimilar to living with an alcoholic, everything will revolve around food and exercise.

Late to the party...I formed the impression when watching HIS documentary that she likes him a lot more than he likes her. (She was draping herself over him when singing Islands In the Stream).

Sadly within 10 secs of him being on screen again this time I formed the exact impression. Making an excuse not to kiss her and then "joking" about there being lots of things he doesn't like about her.

I suspect he doesn't really respect her. She let him away with the affair(s) and he's had to prop up her business.

It's a shame because I quite like her. She's never done anyone any harm has she?

I read the Tom Bower book, he’s not a nice person and he clearly hates them but I suppose it’s accurate enough, otherwise they would have sued him.

According to his book her fashion business has been haemorrhaging money from the outset, she’s allegedly horrible to staff and neither of them ever tip in restaurants. She’s also portrayed as being quite dim.

The dim bit really comes across to me but that might be because her brain isn’t getting enough nutrition.

Dear God when you guys said this prog was boring, you weren't joking! Just endless footage of her with her fashion designers and models. I'd rather she'd talked us through her TEN engagement rings and showed us her wardrobe.

I think she has a really bad case of imposter syndrome but in a weird way she's right - she's just an average gal who got lucky.

I found it interesting but think it was too heavily focused around her fashion business....as a millenial who loved the spice girls i would have enjoyed more of an insight into her time with them, aswell as more about her family life.
I felt David's was more authentic and followed his life story in more depth.

the thing about David Bekham’s one was that overall his passion and talent and genuine love for football shone throughout. Plus it is factually true that he was amongst the very top players on the planet.

the problem with Victoria’s story is that she was a very modestly talented girl who had parents that supported her ambitions enough to remortgage their house to finance them. And thank goodness it worked out that she got lucky and won an audition for a manufactured girlband that then went on to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. Basically she got lucky by being the right person in the right place at the right time.

The program would have been much more interesting if it had delved deeper into her knack of reinventing herself to fit in with whatever the zeitgeist is which seems to be her real craft than trying to portray her as someone with genuine gifts and skills.

Basically David’s was a proper docu about a genuine phenomenon in the footballing world. Victoria’s is a vanity project.