The Spice Girls are like German biscuits in reverse. They don’t remind you of the seasons – the seasons remind you of them. On the eve of St George’s Day, our minds turn inexorably to Geri Halliwell’s union jack dress. The approach of the Summer Olympics in Paris makes you wonder who the French could possibly find in their musical pantheon to match London’s closing ceremony, and its full-ensemble performance of Spice Up Your Life. And the weekend marked the start of birthday season, with Victoria Beckham holding a party for her 50th at the private members’ club Oswald’s in London. She is not the oldest Spice Girl, even though she always acted like the one who wished everyone else would grow up: that’s Geri, who turned 50 two years ago.
Memories of Ginger and her performative patriotism are bittersweet: she loved red, white and blue and she really loved Margaret Thatcher, and it felt a little bit underexamined at the time – like, what was it exactly that she loved about Thatcher? Rapid deindustrialisation and utility privatisation? Yet given the choice between Geri’s capers and what came later – public figures cosplaying the Iron Lady to baby talk a stupefied electorate while causing havoc to the nation’s wellbeing – I would take Geri any day, not just as a Spice Girl, but also as prime minister. In fact, I would take any Spice Girl over any of the last five prime ministers, and Mel C in particular. She seems like a person who gets stuff done.
Halliwell-Horner, as she is now, is currently clouded by words such as “difficulties” and “travails”, which, if I have understood correctly, revolve around her husband, Christian Horner, and a situation at his work that was resolved by a woman being suspended. Whatever the optics of that, it cannot conceivably be a Geri-created problem, and yet she is the one who is rumoured to be in talks with Netflix about a fly-on-the-wall marriage documentary, because once you are in travail, the best disinfectant is a load of flies.
The blueprint for that was, of course, the Posh and Becks documentary (and arguably the blueprint for that was the Harry and Meghan forerunner), which brought Netflix its highest audience for the form last year, 3.8 million viewers in its first week. That was billed as, among other things, warts-and-all about David Beckham’s long-past affair with Rebecca Loos (because once there’s an ancient wound, the best remedy is a load of warts), but what really won the crowd over was a sweet exchange about how posh Posh was. She said she was working class, then David pointed out that her dad drove her to school in a Rolls-Royce. So the answer, clearly, was “somewhere between posh and not posh”. The nation wasn’t questing after a definitive account of the British class system and one celebrity’s place in it – rather, everyone wanted to know whether Posh and Becks still liked each other, and it appeared that they did.
Emma Bunton tied the knot with Jade Jones after more than 20 years in a relationship: yup, she must be happy enough. Both the Melanies are settled with guys who don’t muster a trace of gossip between them, so they must be OK. Mel B revealed in February that she had been so skint after divorcing her “abusive” ex-husband (Stephen Belafonte denies that he was abusive) that she had to shop in Lidl, and there was a lot of faux-outrage on behalf of the budget supermarket (What in God’s name was wrong with Lidl?), underneath which was a very strong current of: “Thank God she’s back on her feet and can now shop at Waitrose.” They don’t all have to be billionaires, but they are, after all, Spice Girls: you couldn’t put a number on the amount of clover they have to be in for the universe to appear just, but it is definitely “some”.
This is all building to the weird realisation that all anyone wants for the Spice Girls is for them to seem moderately happy. If they can still remember their dance routines and turn up for each other’s birthdays, great; if they have one more tour with all five of them, even better (for Mel B, definitely). But the ambient goodwill that goes into long-term celebrity is like compound interest: you don’t really notice it, and then it’s massive.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
