The truth about Brooklyn Beckham

The media made him; is it time to stop frying the Beckham heir?

Heir fryer. (YouTube/Typhur)

Brooklyn Beckham has been paraded on red carpets and football pitches since his rusk-chewing, nappy-tsunami years. He’s not a wannabe, or even a nepobaby, strictly speaking: he is the fetch that newspapers and magazines have been trying to make happen since his birth, because dynastic celebrity is an easy sell. Much of his allure lies in imagining what it’s like to have Posh and Becks as a mum and dad, to have Goldenballs tending to your grazed knee or Victoria lighting the candles on your birthday cake and grounding you for not tidying your room.

This is not Brooklyn’s fault. Much like the children of mummy and daddy influencers, baby Brooklyn had no agency, carried into the middle of pitch celebrations after cup finals, hoisted on stage during music concerts, and scooped up into blacked-out jeeps while cameras flashed and paparazzi jeered. You cannot accuse Brooklyn of craving fame; he possesses it whether he likes it or not, and however misguided and myopic his projects as an adult have been, they suggest he is at least trying to make sense of the fame thrust upon him, perhaps even give it meaning, or value. This presents a problem: there’s no doubting his parents’ work ethic, but what’s left for you to achieve once your mum and dad have slogged away so you want for nothing?

The nepobaby debate that circles culture’s landing strip until good weather and boredom allow it to finally touch down every few years doesn’t feel like it quite applies to Brooklyn Beckham. He didn’t live his childhood shielded from the spotlight, only to be whisked out of nowhere, to snatch book deals and air fryer endorsements from the starving mouths of the more deserving working classes. He was groomed for stardom, if not by his parents – although I’d love to know their original plans for their eldest son, the ambitions of the Beckham offspring never feel overly workshopped – then by the media circus that has surrounded him all his life. Brooklyn was on magazine covers before he was out of nappies, usually without his permission, and for a good sixteen years, he played his assigned role of well-adjusted celebrity kid relatively uneventfully.

Brooklyn first invoked fury when his… how can we put this diplomatically… well, it was the photo book, wasn’t it? The underwhelming, creatively vacant What I See, which included the now infamous photograph of an elephant. Out of focus and cast in shadow, the kind of snap that would’ve provoked a helpful, yet condemning, advisory sticker had it been developed down at Prontaprint in the nineties, it was captioned with the kind of good-natured witlessness that makes you tilt your head in sympathy as if you’ve just seen a child let go of a helium-filled balloon. ‘So hard to photograph but incredible to see’.

What I See exposed Brooklyn as someone who probably wouldn’t win a Pulitzer. Now it was clear Brooklyn was not going to follow his parents into one of the two accepted career trajectories for those a little lighter in pyramidal neurons, the media saw an opportunity. Perhaps it was residual resentment from working-class Becks and not-that-posh-really Posh managing to make and spend millions – sometimes tastelessly, especially in the early days – that fuelled the largely Oxbridge-educated commentators’ glee at Brooklyn’s failed endeavours, but there’s no denying that Brooklyn, or his advisors at least, gave them plenty of ammunition.

The career in photography, obviously, attracted much derision, from the book’s release in summer 2017 – God, it’s ages ago, but still gets brought up loads, maybe we should all get a hobby – to dropping out of NYC’s prestigious Parsons School of Design less than a year into his photography course. Beckham the Younger hotfooted it back to Blighty to take up an internship with globally famous shutterbug Rankin, no doubt winding any regular photography graduates finding themselves out of work that year. Along with a side hustle of Diet Coke-grade womanising and annoying his mum, nu-Brooklyn found himself as tabloid fodder. Celebrity magazines, who had little to lose given Victoria stopped speaking to them two decades ago, quoted ‘sources’ but delegated the fury to embedded tweets labelling him ‘spoilt’ and a ‘freeloader’ who only got attention because of his parents.

Interestingly, Vogue, likely reluctant to lose Victoria’s luxury fashion business as an advertiser, opted to profile him with a face so straight, botox must have been out of stock for the rest of the year.

Brooklyn’s next career was very possibly inspired by lockdown stasis. Remember the notorious viral video of Brooklyn being stopped in his $1.2m McLaren sports car by a car-obsessed TikToker and asked, to help make sense of how someone could afford such a sweet ride, what he did for a living? Brooklyn answered ‘chef’ and when asked for advice on ‘how to get into cooking’ reached for the fridge magnet wisdom so beloved of those who never had to queue up in a Costcutter to top up an electricity key card: ‘follow your passion’. Brooklyn’s threat to encroach on the hospitality trade led to many a knife being sharpened, and not just to slice vegetables. It’s fair to say Brooklyn’s not exactly giving Michel Roux much to sweat about, but if we think about, say, social media foodies who use Wotsits as a pie filling, and Antoni from Queer Eye, he’s not exactly out of his depth. Yet the media can’t get enough of Brooklyn’s culinary magic. Interviewed by Variety for its Power of Young Hollywood issue – why? – Brooklyn claimed his ambitions included opening a pub and launching his own kitchenware range. Whether the press takes him seriously or not, head to YouTube and there’s a plethora of high-end publications and organisations – the Michelin Guide even! – courting his stardom and funding Brooklyn-centred content on fashion, food, and photography. The Typhur air fryers Brooklyn is flogging retail for almost 500 dollars. There is serious money flying around here.

@itsdanielmacBruh What Even Is A “Chef Name 😅💀@brooklynbeckham #mclarenp1 #p1

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If anything, though, his most successful pivot has been to mirror his dad’s favourite side hustle, as confirmed Wife Guy. Watching Brooklyn and his wife Nicola – also the offspring of billionaires with her own CV of vaguely low-risk endeavours – muddle their way through married life is perhaps the most relatable he’s ever been, and the media is lapping it up. For a start, it keeps Posh and Becks – apparently not Nicola’s biggest fans – on the circuit, making picture editors’ jobs a lot easier.

Watching this video made for GQ, you quickly get a deeper understanding into what makes Brooklyn and Nicola tick. In short: the real world has yet to present itself to them and if it did, it would likely destroy them.

It’s easy to watch this interview and demand they be launched into the sun. Their background – rich, famous and powerful parents, nice houses, opportunities opening up like lotuses at regular junctures – and their daydreamy, like-and-subscribe auto-patter don’t exactly evince self-awareness or elicit empathy. But doesn’t it, and almost every scrap of coverage, feel like a giant setup? What wisdom are we expecting from two young people who spend their lives gliding from one tastefully decorated room to another in clothes they’re wearing for the very first time and didn’t pay for? They are unqualified to be anything other than this.

Want this kind of person to die out? Time to crush capitalism, I guess, but don’t forget to swing by the lords, ladies, princelings and other titled bloodsuckers who actually are hoovering up all the good stuff for themselves. What are Brooklyn and Nicola taking from you other than the minutes you fritter away reading about the ice sculptures at their wedding, or watching the below video – for Vogue – where Brooklyn cooks dairy-based meals for his lactose-intolerant wife? (It’s like watching two people who never met before try to fool Immigration into giving them a green card.)

If we resent Brooklyn for exploiting his connections to take up ridiculous pet projects, we must ask which career trajectory would be acceptable? What else are people like this supposed to do? Get jobs in Five Guys? Would you want them in your office, doing a coffee run? Charity work? Give something back? No sane charity wants a famous person hanging round 24/7, with all their ideas. What do we do with celebrity offspring, whose own stardom has been nurtured and exploited by almost all forms of media, from low-rent to highbrow? What do we want from them now? To allow themselves to be ridiculed, to never try? Brooklyn seems friendly and wholesome but he isn’t academic or particularly articulate – how much longer can we throw rotten tomatoes at him? Should he slink off into obscurity? But what does obscurity mean for someone like Brooklyn Beckham, and who controls it?

The truth is that he can’t win, and even though his various perceived inadequacies are well documented, the urge to find new ways to humiliate him seems irresistible. A recent interview in The Times seemed keen for Brooklyn to say something dumb, and when he managed to swerve that, took various snide swipes, including the way he speaks.

It felt like an attempt to expose Brooklyn as not just thick, but classless, and thus someone easily dismissed, which goes all the way back to my earlier point about the seething resentment from the chattering classes about his parents’ success – David and his salt of the earth, touchline-hovering parents, and Victoria and, in their view, her outwardly vulgar new-money boom years childhood, being ferried to school in a secondhand Rolls. Not for nothing did the clip from the Netflix documentary where David questioned Victoria’s true working-class credentials go viral.

Whatever you think of him, Brooklyn Beckham is a media creation, facilitated by his parents, encouraged by leading publications, fumbling to work out what comes next. He’s a puzzle we have created and are reluctant to solve – because toying with him is so much fun. Maybe we should think about that. Let the boy be. He’s earned his air fryer money.

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