KEY POINTS:
Victoria Beckham's attempts to woo the media since arriving in Los Angeles to join soccer star husband David have backfired. The NBC reality show Victoria Beckham: Coming to America, intended as a mini-series, was trimmed to a one-hour special by the NBC network.
It was billed as showing "Victoria's larger-than-life world and revealing, among other things, her wicked sense of humour and style". But critics slammed the pop-star turned fashion figure as "relentlessly self-promoting, with vapid, condescending behaviour" and her new home as a "nightmarishly overdone rococo mansion" in Beverly Hills.
Beckham, Posh in the 1990s British girl band The Spice Girls, had hoped the special would showcase her humor 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.
Gail Pennington of the St Louis Post-Dispatch wrote: "To the Brits, they are Posh and Becks. To most Americans they're- who?"
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 humor.
"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.
Viewing figures showed that the NBC program documenting Beckham's house-hunting, attempts to get a US driving license and lessons on surviving an earthquake was the third-most watched show in its time slot on Monday.
Some 4.9 million people tuned in, but more watched repeats of ABC's "Wife Swap" and two CBS sitcoms.
- REUTERS
