Victoria: My life with David

A touching, if somewhat ambiguous, moment occurs in the highly-anticipated TV documentary Being Victoria Beckham when Posh and Becks are having a quiet meal together in the kitchen of their Hertfordshire home and Victoria starts clearing away the dishes and wiping the table.

Superficially it is a charming, homely scene: the other side of Victoria Beckham away from the showbiz and the glamour. In fact it is nothing of the sort. Beckham himself breaks the spell. He looks at his wife as she busies herself with a dampened dishcloth, pretending that clearing-up is something she does every day.

He smiles and simply says: "You don't, though."

The message is clear, as it sums up the essence of so much of Victoria Beckham: the poor sweet girl thinks that by doing something for the cameras the rest of us will be fooled into thinking that's what goes on in real life. Perhaps she even fools herself.

The whole programme, shown on ITV1 next Monday, is based upon the tantalising premise that by allowing cameras to follow her for six months what will be revealed will be a fascinating insight into the real Victoria Beckham, the one only her husband and close friends and family ever see.

As Posh herself says in the introduction to Granada's supposedly fly-on-the-wall documentary: "When I was a little girl I always wanted to be famous. But I had no idea what it would be like being Victoria Beckham." The trouble is, by the end of the 75-minute programme none of us really has any idea either. What we do see is a girl who constantly mistakes the showbusiness fantasy she always aspires to for real life.

Never was this more apparent than in a cosy chat on a big white sofa when Victoria is cuddled up next to David, extolling the virtues of being pregnant. "That giving birth - I love it." Beckham gives her an indulgent smile and says "It was a caesarean. You didn't feel it."

"It's exciting, though," twitters Victoria. The overwhelming impression is of a person who is deeply, deeply superficial. On that white sofa again - David and Victoria have a conversation about the merits of Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and Julia Roberts, based entirely on the criterion of how good looking they are - as if that were the only way they ever judged people.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Victoria is a mass of insecurities. "When I was at school I was a complete minger, " she says. The cameras follow her to a photo shoot when she says she had to be persuaded to pose in a revealing one-piece swimsuit: "Even when I'm doing a glamorous photo shoot I still feel like that spotty teenager."

Mind you, she has a lot to be modest about. One of the more devastating comments in the programme came from her former dance teacher Joyce Spriggs who said: "If she had not been doing what she is doing now she would probably be working on a cruise liner. There are a lot of girls with more talent that are doing less than Victoria is doing."

The documentary also tells us Posh had fairy lights at their wedding after seeing a church similarly decked out in an episode of Friends; she says she'd die of a broken heart if David ever left her; and, while retracing Julia Roberts's Pretty Woman spree on Rodeo Drive, she reveals: "I really want to be Joan Collins."

She has a pretty good rival in the superficiality stakes in the form of her husband. One of the documentary's more amusing revelations covers the night he first outside the Portland Hospital to face the cameras after the birth of Brooklyn. "Can you believe it?" Victoria says. "He said, 'Does my hair look okay?'"

In another of their white sofa chats, David and Victoria giggle about a film they had seen the night before which they found "really scary". The film was What Lies Beneath and it is easy to see why they found it so frightening. It is a question they ask themselves every night. And the answer we now know, is: Nothing.

At one stage we see Posh after an appearance on the Jerry Springer chat show when she complains he had been trying to look down her top.

Perhaps he wasn't trying to catch a glimpse of her breasts at all - he was just looking for the real Victoria Beckham.

Enough already?