Channel 4’s baffling documentary consists of a lorryload of content creators flapping their hands while providing no new information or insight. A triumph of noise for noise’s sake
B
y now, the fallout from Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram broadside against his parents has reached a point of total saturation. There have been news reports, memes, obsessive TikTok deep dives and newspaper thinkpieces covering the story from every conceivable angle. “Brooklyn Beckham is doing his best” said the New York Times. “It’s time to believe adult children when they speak out against their toxic parents,” said BuzzFeed. “The Beckham family feud is every mother’s worst nightmare,” said the Independent. And on it went.
So you have to respect Channel 4 for gazing out across this exhausting event horizon of a story and identifying a gap in the market. Until now, nobody has managed to turn the Beckham family drama into a shrill 30-minute primetime documentary where a lorryload of content creators flap their hands while providing no new information or insight. Thanks to Beckham: Family at War, that gap has been filled. Congratulations, everyone.
What a baffling documentary this is. It offers a surface-level explanation of the story (a young man severing ties with his apparently controlling family), which would have been handy for a mainstream novice audience, but the entire thing is fully geared towards the sort of terminally online person who already knows the drama in forensic detail, and those aren’t people who are likely to watch Channel 4 on a midweek evening.
