Netflix has scored a brilliant goal with Beckham seemingly out of nowhere

There’s an amazingly good value bit in Netflix’s fabulous four-part series Beckham where Victoria Beckham recalls how while pregnant in 2005, on bed rest and “about to burst” with third child Cruz, she told David that a Madrid hospital had scheduled her C-section for Monday. Alas, that’s not the best timing for him – he has a photo shoot lined up with Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé.

The comic manner in which Victoria leans into the camera and exasperatedly blares the two women’s names is alone enough to understand why American director Fisher Stevens knew from his first dinner with the couple that he was going to say yes to the project, which he did in part because Victoria was “hilarious, really funny”.

The underlying situation in her story about the birth of Cruz – like the one about being offered a polo mint by the woman sitting beside her as thousands of football fans sang “Posh Spice takes it up the arse” – is inherently dark, yet relayed through a lens of dry humour that not everyone is fortunate to get.

But Stevens gets it, and shares it, so Victoria’s memory of lying there, “pissed off” after being shown a newspaper with a “gorgeous picture” of her husband flanked by Lopez and Beyoncé, is deliciously intercut with contemporaneous footage of David beaming away, first at the shoot, then at a press conference announcing the arrival of another beautiful son.

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If viewers somehow miss the skill with which this snapshot of the Beckhams’ difficult Spanish memories has been put together, then the segment that follows – a quick-fire edit of a spate of resignations and appointments at Real Madrid – underlines the wit on display.

Like a ball curling into the goal all the way from the halfway line, out of nowhere Netflix has hit the target with Beckham.

It’s not just Victoria. David is self-deprecatingly funny. His mother Sandra, who puts Glenn Hoddle on her “hit list”, is sweet and funny. Gary Neville, his friend and counterpoint, is articulate and funny. Roy Keane – “who the f*** buys a pen? – is obviously funny.

But from honeyed start to bittersweet finish, a compelling strain of sadness runs through these episodes. In the process of extending its subject’s claim to it, Beckham makes one thing abundantly clear: fame is as traumatic as it is absurd.

Watching the opening scenes of the director wandering around garden beehives with David Beckham kitted out in his monogrammed bee suit, I half-wished the actor and Oscar-winning documentarian would slip into character as Hugo from Succession to make things properly spicy. From then on, however, I stopped wanting Beckham to be something it could never be.

[ David Beckham has sold his privacy to Netflix. I’m not buying it ]

Preceding the snowballing positive word-of-mouth was the inevitable grumbling about the fact the series originated from Beckham’s own production company, Studio 99. This is just more glossy celebrity spin, the complaint goes.

And yet pretty much every documentary ever made has encountered a trade-off between access and independence. This series, though Stevens has said he had final cut, falls down on the side of access. Given how long Beckham has been in the never-ending game of brand management, it is hard to see how it could meaningfully exist in any other form.

So while there is no mention of the blemish on Beckham’s reputation that was his lucrative ambassadorship of Qatar in 2022 – Stevens says it was his choice not to include it – and coverage of the not-exactly-denied affair with Rebecca Loos is strictly coded, there is less shying away from other curious decisions, such as the move for the LA Galaxy wilderness that hastened his professional twilight.

Still, at least in LA, the Beckhams could escape the “absolute circus” of Madrid. At least in LA, no one put their school run on live TV.

In 2003, I remember chatting to a veteran British press photographer who predicted that once the Beckhams decamped to Madrid, as they were tipped to do at the time, the tabloids would turn on them. Of course, this was precisely what happened. But blink and you would have missed the phase when they were in favour.

Caught up in the English media’s demand for a fall guy after his red card at the 1998 World Cup, Beckham entered his death-threat era, followed moments after the birth of his first son by his kidnap-threat era. The only protection during this period appears to have come from two brands that were bigger than him and already on his side: the Spice Girls and Manchester United FC. Incited by a hate-stoking press, the anger of some England fans still pulses through the news archive material a quarter of a century later.

[ David Beckham on Netflix: A lesson in how to keep your brand alive through thick and thin ]

Indeed, rather than hailing from a position where everything is wholly controllable and within his control, the heart of the Beckham narrative is an absence of control and his occasionally heartbreaking efforts to try to claw some back for himself, whether that’s through obsessive compulsive cleaning and organising, image-focused business ventures or practising precision kicks.

As soon as he is scouted for United, he is living out a dream superimposed on him by his diehard Red of a father – a point that is made with little judgment, but seems deeply relevant to everything that comes next. Luckily for Netflix, Ted Beckham’s parental pride facilitates the most moving sequence of the series: a simple passage in which Beckham’s vital corners in the dying minutes of the 1999 Champions League final are effectively stitched together with grainy video of David taking multiple corners as a boy.

Somewhere along the line, perhaps from when he first spotted Posh Spice on television, Beckham fashioned a way to get what he wanted for himself. “He’s a stubborn lad,” says Alex Ferguson, no stranger to stubbornness.

What do people want from Netflix if not this?