Posh: Reality Living in America

Along with the rest of the closeted Spice Girls fans across the land, I watched Victoria Beckham: Coming to America last Monday. I will fully admit to an odd fascination with the lives of a few celebrities: I followed Kate Moss’s torrid love affair with Pete Doherty, I’m still intrigued by Suri Cruise (along with Katie Holmes’s outfits) and I love seeing pictures of Victoria Beckham in impossibly high heels and tiny get-ups, carting around her three boys – how does she do it?

The special, originally planned to be a series of six episodes, was shortened when producers were left with little material after Victoria flew back to the UK early to see her football start husband, David Beckham. Producers scrambled and made it into a one-hour special, attracting a mediocre 4 million viewers in the U.S. on Monday.

Like most reality TV shows centred around celebrities, the show was about publicity – and warming Americans up to Victoria, who consistently wears a scowl (and those sky-high heels) in paparazzi shots in papers and on the internet. The show is carefully crafted to show Victoria, though always gorgeous and flawlessly dressed, as a down-to-earth mum who misses her kids, incurs traffic violations, and sometimes drinks too much at afternoon socialite parties.

As with other shows that document the lives of celebrities like The Osbournes and Nick & Jessica: Newlyweds, the editing is deft, frequently poking fun at the show’s subjects. From Ozzy’s exasperated interjections during his children’s squabbles to prolonged shots of Jessica as she tries to figure out if chicken really do live in the sea, we are made to laugh at the follies of the rich and famous.

And this is why we like these shows: they bring celebrities down from their airbrushed spot on a Louis Vuitton pedestal and show us that yes, they are just like us: Ozzy and Sharon have to deal with clearing up dog poop in the house, Nick has to deal with the olfactory aftermath of Jessica’s visit to the bathroom. And while Victoria Beckham is never brought down to this basest of human functions, we are shocked to see her having to step out of her car in [gasp] flats!

Bringing celebrities down to the layperson’s level is a trend of the past decade or so. Remember back in the 80s when Robin Leach took us through the lavish and serviced homes and lives of celebrities in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? That programme was deftly edited, too – but it was all the boring, diurnal bits that were left out. Now, we want to see those bits. Celebrity magazines - a niche once left to the National Enquirer and News of the World, but now expanding faster than Nicole Richie’s pregnant belly - frequently run stories about celebrity cellulite and other body flaws the magic of Hollywood manages to hide. (And I use the term "stories" loosely, since much of the story is told through glaring graphics and little text.)

While Victoria Beckham does remain quite flawless throughout the special, we do see that she is followed around by her own makeup artist and hairdresser, and refuses to consume a proffered cookie from the bitchy celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton. But we also see her sweet side: stumbling over what she wants to be a polite description of a chubby, plastic, dolphin-calling socialite and dressing up a sex doll to act as a decoy so she can buy her husband a watch.

And though I never did figure out how she manages three boys whilst wearing skinny jeans and Louboutin heels, perhaps we will discover more in the near future: David Beckham has just signed on to star in his own reality series. Now, if only someone would convince Kate Moss to open up her model lifestyle to the scrutiny of the layperson…