I read the news today, oh boy. Brooklyn Peltz Beckham does not wish to reconcile with his family. If you thought this was a “story” from a gossip magazine – you know the type: Hello!, OK!, The Daily Mail – then think again. Hang on: let me clarify. The story is all over actual gossip magazines, but even supposedly serious news organisations like the BBC and The Guardian are running with it. Does anyone really give a toss? Astonishingly, I think quite a lot of people give a toss, maybe more than a single toss, about it.
Enjoying a short back and scrape at my local barber shop I could not help but notice the TV was babbling on about nothing else. Happily, the sound was mainly muted but I could not avoid the sight of hosts Ed Balls and Susanna Reid, as well as Kate Garraway and some strange orange bloke sitting in front of a sign which said HOLLYWOOD telling us all we needed to know. In my case that was nothing, but everyone else in the shop was plainly fascinated. Why?
Well, it’s the cult of celebrity, isn’t it? Sir David Beckham, as he is known these days, was one of our great footballers. He’s extremely charismatic, very good looking (bastard) and is these days a full-time celebrity. His wife, Lady Posh Spice, was a modestly talented (at best) singer and now designs clothes. Becks, or Sir Becks as I should address him, does some high profile charity work, too. On the basis of celebrity, it follows logically that as we are interested in Sir and Lady Becks, we should be interested in their personal lives, too.
While I am not interested in what goes on between their four walls, I am not dim enough to understand that they made their fortune, at least partly, on the back of the careful curation of image. In other words, they skilfully use the media to suit their own ends, particularly their financial ends. Maybe Becks is an exception, but few former footballers attract the amount of publicity he does. None of this happened by accident. As they say, you live by the sword and you die by it. Once you’ve controlled the media, then they try to control you and that is of course what is happening.
But let’s not just blame the media because if we – that’s the royal ‘we’, which doesn’t include me – don’t engage with it, then Posh and Becks are just a couple of has beens. Yet we do. Everyone in the barbershop was talking about Brooklyn Beckham and I just wanted to change the subject. The excellent Lorraine Kelly came next and guess what the only subject was? By now, I was praying for my absurd old man’s eyebrows to be trimmed so I could settle up and get away from it all.
If you buy the Mail, Sun, Mirror, Express and the rest of the gutter press, be honest: you buy it to get the tittle-tattle. If you watch Good Morning Britain, it’s the same. Do not pretend otherwise because I won’t believe you. But when it comes to the websites I follow, the BBC and The Guardian, I am not interested in Brooklyn’s desire “to speak for myself and tell the truth“. Clearly Becks junior thinks we all give a shit and on the evidence of my in-depth research, he’s right.
I left the barber with a lot less hair but a lot less Posh and Becks in my life. I have nothing against them at all, as I have nothing against their offspring. I don’t know them, I will never know them, what they get up to is their business, not mine. The realisation that I may be in a minority is a bit of a surprise, so I can only assume some people’s lives are so boring they need to obsess about the lives of others. If Brooklyn ever gets back with his parents, I’m sure I’ll hear about it. Whether I’ll want to is quite another matter.
