Victoria Beckham's bid to woo Americans has apparently backfired with damning reviews of a reality TV show that she hoped would overturn her image here as a sour-faced diva.
The New York Post called the show, which was screened in the US on Monday and on ITV last night, "an orgy of self-indulgence" and described Beckham as "vapid and condescending."
Beckham arrived in Los Angeles last week in a media blitz promoting the couple as style icons and mega-celebrities both on and off the football field.
She had hoped the reality special ‘Victoria Beckham: Coming to America’ would showcase her humour and personality to a nation which has heard much but knows little of her outside pictures.
"I think people will really get to see what I'm really like. I'm just a normal girl from London. People can have preconceptions because of the photographs they see of me and the stories they read," she told reporters last week.
Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times said that such reality shows "rely on a fish-out-of-water conceit but in Beverly Hills she is a fish-in-Evian, one rich, blonde, spray tanned wife-of among many."
"Beckham, who is bizarrely constantly posing even in her own home, offers insights about how major a certain purse is or how her new phone has changed her life," Linda Stasi wrote in The New York Post.
Beckham, who plans to push her jeans, sunglasses and perfume lines in the United States, said last week she hoped Americans would appreciate her dry, British sense of humour.
"If people like it, that's great. If they don't, I'm not losing any sleep over it," she said of the TV special.
