There’s a moment in Victoria Beckham, Netflix’s new three-part documentary, where David and Victoria are having a heart-to-heart in a cabin overlooking their manmade lake at their £12m Cotswolds mansion.
“Don’t you feel confident enough that you can sit back and relax?” he asks, rather tenderly. “What is stopping you from saying, ‘Okay, I’ve achieved it’? Who are you trying to prove this to?” As her voice cracks with emotion, VB responds, ”Maybe a lot of it is to you.” He shrugs and says, “You could make a cheese sandwich and we’d be proud of you.” She replies, both with tears and laughter: “Let’s be honest, I couldn’t actually make a cheese sandwich very well.”
This, you see, is Brand Beckham 2.0 – the power couple’s Kardashified reinvention. Borrowing the Kardashians’ “at home with” format, we’re presented with a tight family unit, living between its various mega mansions around the world – London, Miami, Oxfordshire and Dubai. Victoria Beckham is the companion series to Netflix’s 2023 Beckham documentary (for which they’ve reportedly made £20m in total) and it’s understood that the Beckhams were given full editorial control.
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Victoria Beckham dishes out endless public displays of affection upon her husband, David (Netflix)
With VB dishing out endless PDSs (public displays of affection) upon David, there are of course, moments that feel performative, designed to distract from any, ahem, current disharmony with their eldest. But there are also plenty of signs that suggest this celebrity dynasty could actually be human too – there’s Harper ticking off VB for messing up their TikTok dance routine, David shaking his head and walking away from another one of Victoria’s stories, and VB talking about “burying her boobs in Baden-Baden”.
It won’t have escaped your attention that Meghan Markle has also flung open her very grand doors to Netflix again, with her second series of With Love, Meghan, released in August. Because, as both VB and MM know only too well, if you want to reach new audiences, you’ve got to show “real life” behind the scenes. At home, notes the celebrity PR Mark Borkowski, “is where they feel comfortable. Look at the success of Hello! and OK! – that’s how they managed to get those talks over the line. So it’s, ‘Take a look at my glossy kitchen!’” Just as with Hello! And OK!, celebrities can insist on content approval, but here, adds Borkowski, they can enjoy “bigger audiences”.
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Victoria Beckham’s early Posh Spice days with fellow Spice Girls, Emma Bunton and Melanie Chisholm (Netflix)
The similarities between Victoria and Meghan don’t end with the Netflix series. Both women are confessed “control freaks”, and they are branching out into merch, which they need to shift. Meghan with her As Ever wine and entertaining products (flower sprinkles, anyone?), VB with her fashion and beauty lines, both women know that (in theory at least), by role-modelling their fabulous lifestyles – the immaculate veg patches, the professional kitchens, the status socialising – we may be persuaded that we really want to be like them and therefore will happily buy into them.
Both have also been in Paris this month for fashion week – but where VB now commands the hard-earned respect from everyone from Anna Wintour downwards, Markle only saw her epic fails go viral, including what’s been dubbed her Zoolander walk as she strutted into a fashion show, being accused of laughing at a stumbling model, and an awkward kiss mis-aim with Balenciaga’s Pierpaolo Piccioli. The tone-deaf limo reel, filmed close to where Diana died, further cemented the feeling of Meghan Markle’s overwhelming self-absorption.
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Meghan Markle has seen her ‘epic fails go viral’ (Netflix)
There are other key differences, not least in their deployment of that key publicity strategy, vulnerability. After receiving criticism for glossing over David’s alleged affair with Rebecca Loos in Beckham, it feels like the Beckhams have upped the vulnerability quotient for this series. We see Victoria Beckham admit to having an eating disorder for the very first time, as well as opening up about her label being tens of millions of pounds in the red, being bullied and uncool at school, and enduring decades of media vitriol. (It is, of course, a highly curated version of vulnerability – still no word on the alleged rift with her eldest son, for example.) “People like it when celebrities can say, ‘I f***ed up’, or, ‘That was really difficult for us,’” explains celebrity agent Elaine Foran. “Showing your vulnerability makes you relatable; it makes people like you more.” Ker-ching.
Being “at home” with Meghan, however, meant her inviting “new friends” (ie, well-known people that may have been more acquaintances, and were certainly not guests at her wedding) over to her Montecito mansion. She then attempts to impress with dull, trad-wifey crafts (water marbling, book binding, flower pressing), which just felt laboured and inauthentic.
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Victoria and David Beckham started dating in 1997 (Netflix)
“It was excruciating,” says Foran. “I couldn’t imagine her doing any of those things. It felt very forced and awkward.” So while the Beckhams have arguably endeared viewers to them, With Love, Meghan only seems to have bolstered her haters and spawned a spate of negative publicity.
That’s not to say that Meghan and Harry haven’t overshared in the past (that Oprah interview, and of course, Harry with that memoir, Spare). But it has landed differently. “They’ve been vulnerable in a really moany way,” says Foran. “If you’re that privileged, you cannot moan.” Borkowski puts it down to “not having the right people around them, not listening to advice, and not having any public relations EQ.” Or maybe just not listening to them.
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In the documentary, we see Victoria Beckham admit to having an eating disorder for the very first time (Netflix)
In fact, even the media bosses are unimpressed, with one Spotify exec, Bill Simmons, labelling Harry and Meghan as “grifters“ in 2022 after their $20m podcast deal abruptly ended. “You live in f***ing Montecito and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family and you just complain about them,” he said.
Harry is nowhere to be seen in With Love, Meghan. If he had have been allowed, maybe he would have been able to add the warmth and side-eye humour, it so desperately needed. Over at Beckham Towers, David, as well as always championing VB and her work, has important work to do around keeping Victoria grounded, keeping her in check with some typical Brit-self-depricating zingers (who could forget his much-memed line in Beckham: “What did your dad drive you to school in?”).
Whereas Harry and Meghan’s children’s faces are rarely shown – often shown from behind, or obscured or just referenced in anecdotes, the family element for VB has been marketing gold, says Foran: “It brings in different viewers because the Beckhams have fans within different age groups.”
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‘Meghan became the wicked queen in the “Snow White” narrative’ (Netflix)
So should Meghan have hauled Harry back in the picture? It’s too late for that, says Borkowski: “Meghan became the wicked queen in the Snow White narrative. Harry was this person that everybody loved, this knockabout, nice–but-dim character that was sucked into this west coast lifestyle of parties and sunshine and fruit salads.”
So, for now, it is Victoria who has managed to do what Meghan hasn’t. Become our TV queen and win over hearts and minds.