Did anyone else feel a flicker of shame watching the Beckham documentary? I did. Those poor Beckhams. That wedding. Those monstrous matching purple outfits. Those thrones. God how we sniggered and sneered. What was wrong with us?
The gripping four-part Netflix documentary they have made is instructive in so many ways, but the most interesting thing I took from it was how harshly two hard-working working-class people who succeeded in rising above their station got smashed down for it in so many ways by a culture that at the time celebrated the public shaming of the newly coined “chav”. Were they laughed at, reviled and vilified because they were highly ambitious and “common”?
