I am talking about celebrity culture itself, still a huge force gripping the nation, and this week’s unexpected online post in which Brooklyn tears down his parents, David and Victoria Beckham. He says the family brand which they have spent almost 30 years building is false and damaging; he says he wants no part of it ever again. His message to his parents’ millions of followers is that they have all been deceived.

For several years now, ever since he got married to American heiress Nicola Peltz at the tender age of 23, there have been rumors of a feud between him and the family he left behind. Something to do with his bride, his fashion designer mother, and a wedding dress, the gossipmongers said. Now, in a sensational move, Brooklyn has confirmed all of this and more.

Via a post on his Instagram account, the 26-year-old said his parents had left him with “no choice but to speak for myself and tell the truth about some of the lies”. He complained that they have “controlled narratives in the press” for his entire life, with “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships” being “a fixture of the life I was born into”. He has seen them “place countless lies in the media”, he alleged, “mostly at the expense of innocent people, to preserve their own facade”. His wedding day was one of anxiety and embarrassment, he said, with his mother allegedly hogging what should have been his first dance with his bride to dance “very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.” Yes, that would be “on” me, rather than “with” me — does he mean a lap dance? Ouch. Oedipus Becks, indeed.

David and Victoria have not responded to Brooklyn’s allegations. But, as someone who has spent 20 years interviewing celebrities, with their consent but not always with their enthusiasm, I see this development as a significant one. Not so much for what it might reveal about Brand Beckham from behind the scenes — I mean, come on, how did we really think they managed to stay in favor for such a long time? — but for what it means. A younger generation of stars, Brooklyn’s generation, no longer wants to play the old game. They would rather go scorched-earth on their own families than pose for one more group photo with one more fake smile.

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To my mind, having watched up close how such people operate, Brooklyn’s words have the ring of truth to them. But it still feels rather incredible that we should have heard it from his lips. This is partly because — and let’s be honest here — compared to his canny parents, Brooklyn always seemed like a simpler kind of guy. If you’ve watched either of his parents’ recent documentary series on Netflix, you’ll know how hard they have worked to get where they are. Their eldest child Brooklyn, however, has always seemed the clown prince of nepo-babies, announcing that he’s a photographer one week and a chef the next, in much the same way that I might fix a dripping tap and declare myself a plumber. So for him to take control of the narrative like this, revealing his anxiety, his pain but also his happiness, is quite startling.

You see, after the News of the World shut down in 2011, with the Leveson Inquiry subsequently exposing the underhand methods by which the tabloids had harvested gossip, it felt like the end of an era. We had known so much about the lives of the rich and famous, but now reporters were on edge, celebrities felt betrayed, and the creative industries of film, fashion and music were unsure how to rebuild their relationship with the media. Who in their right mind would want their private life splashed across the press anyway?

What followed was an era in which celebrities communicated on their own terms, with families like the Beckhams taking advantage of what had become a weakened press. Reporters no longer rifled through voicemail inboxes. Social media permitted one-way, polished communication. Today, long lens paparazzi shots from photographers hiding in bushes are almost a thing of the past, for Instagram is full of celebs acting as their own paparazzi and posting their own bikini photos from the beach — though more flatteringly staged, of course. All this means that celebrities have far more control over their public image than they ever used to.

The Beckhams are among the best practitioners of this new style of celebrity, notably via the medium of the self-produced TV documentary. Here, more than any other medium except perhaps Instagram, stars can secure their reputations on their own terms. And this is where Brand Beckham has played a blinder — perhaps because David and Victoria knew that Brooklyn was a bomb waiting to go off, and therefore wanted an early victory in the court of public opinion.

David’s three-episode life story, released in 2023, outlined how hard he had worked at soccer from boyhood, pushed unrelentingly by a father who never praised his talent or said well done. We heard about the hard yards and sheer joy of his early success with England, only to be followed by years of rejection: the young midfielder was blamed for the team’s failure and had a bad time in Spain. There was a brief allusion to Rebecca Loos and tabloid stories about alleged infidelity, somehow told as if David was once again the victim of a story in which he might just, you know, not be. The series was a hit.

So was Victoria’s, which came out in 2025. It showed her to have a sense of humor that had previously been missed by many. The series emphasized how doggedly Victoria had worked to be taken seriously in the fashion industry after her pop career in the Spice Girls came to an end. Having watched the show, former doubters came away saying how much they liked her now.

Yet celebrity culture is changing. In some cases, the glossiness has been torn away. Little more than a decade after the end of the Leveson Inquiry, Prince Harry, one of the people most aggrieved by Leveson’s subject matter, was giving us more of his private life than any journalist had ever dredged up. In a move that surely inspired Brooklyn, Harry had married a glamorous American, turned his back on a dynastic British family, and then written a memoir so long that after 12 hours of the audiobook I couldn’t take any more revelations and gave up listening.

The painful authenticity, so unlike the staged photos, is evident in music, too. Lily Allen ended last year with an incredibly revealing album about the breakdown of her celebrity marriage, while other pop stars, such as Charli XCX and Lizzo, have unexpectedly taken to Substack to write long essays about their lives. Sometimes that authenticity is being foisted on the rich and powerful rather than chosen by them: this week, Donald Trump has been posting Emmanuel Macron’s private appeals for diplomacy straight onto the internet for the world to see.

As for the Beckhams, their near-pristine public image has been damaged, but they are unlikely to lose the affection of the public. The thing is, Victoria and David are both clearly hard workers: nobody can deny the lifetime of effort they have put in. So I’m sure their son won’t turn everyone against them. A brief check online shows all sorts of commenters saying that Brooklyn is a brat who will soon be running back to Mummy and Daddy for cash, apparently not having noticed that he’s left a family of multi-millionaires to live with one of actual billionaires. (His father-in-law, Nelson Peltz, is a well-known investor and businessman.) Perhaps it feels safe to publicly denounce your parents as liars once you have access to even more expensive lawyers than they do.

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Of course, one can’t guarantee that the person saying “It was all lies!” is any closer to the truth than those they accuse. But in an age of younger celebrities seeking to claim their “truth”, Brand Family is going to be harder to maintain. The Royals can’t do it, the Beckhams can’t do it — but does their survival actually depend on it? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes, in that they won’t be able to carry on in quite the same way. Victoria’s already been through this with the Spice Girls, who tried and failed to carry on after Geri Halliwell walked out. David Beckham, an experienced captain, knows a winning soccer team creates a magic that is greater than the sum of its parts. With videos showing the apparent frostiness of Victoria towards her son and her daughter-in-law, the PR campaign that so recently revealed her warmth and sense of humor might all be in vain. Plus, Brooklyn may have further bombshells yet to come. Then there are the rumors about David and Victoria’s marriage that have swirled around the media for years. None of our business you might say, and you’d be absolutely right — if Brand Beckham weren’t trading on their nuclear family image for quite so many business deals.

So might this be the thread that, after so many other dramas have been successfully stitched over, finally starts to pull Brand Beckham apart? And, in an even more unlikely twist, could it be that the formerly-derided Brooklyn, only recently presumed too young to know his own mind, turns out to be the wise old sage who wakes us all up to the truth of celebrity, once and for all? He was the first nepo-baby that my generation, young in the Nineties, paid much attention to, making him all too easy to mock. Now that he’s revealed how it feels to grow up in one’s very own Truman Show, perhaps we’ll be less quick to believe any other celebrities who still play the glossy reality card. And perhaps we’ll also be less surprised when their children try to leave.

That doesn’t mean I don’t adore reality TV. I’ve loved it in all its forms; the talent shows (The X Factor), the boss shows (The Apprentice), the scripted soap shows (TOWIE) and even the awful squalid ones about hoarding which seem to be the mainstay of Channel 5. I’ve never had a sex dream about an actor or pop star, but at the height of his Kitchen Nightmares I had one about Gordon Ramsay which lasted three consecutive nights. I’m hazy on the details, but it was immensely enjoyable and there was a lot of swearing.

But Britain’s talent shows ran out of talent a while ago: Simon Cowell cancelled The X Factor last year, after 17 seasons; The X Factor: Celebrity (2019) attracted fewer than 3 million viewers during its first live show — its lowest ratings ever. Compare that with the Will Young/Gareth Gates Pop Idol final, which was watched 20 years ago this month by 15 million people; I remember voting ten times for Gates before my husband hid the phone from me.

It’s never hurt that the sort of people I loathe — pretentious, pompous, right-on Lady Mucks — hate reality TV. See Annie Lennox, sneering that The X Factor is “a factory, owned and stitched up by puppet masters”. Lord forbid that people should want to watch something which amuses rather than lectures them.

Though the stories about My Gran Dying And I’m Doing This For Her got a bit much in the end, there were many beautiful moments backstage at the talent shows when a contestant’s working-class family could be seen embracing and praying, giving lie to all the snideness that the masses generally provoke from commentators.

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The kids were refreshingly down-to-earth, too; 20 years ago, reality TV was just a gap year for fit proletarian youngsters. As Saskia Howard-Clarke, from season six of Big Brother in 2005, told me while I was making a documentary called Reality TV Is Good For You: “I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn’t be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I’ve already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I’m going to get back to work.”

But with the rise of social media, things have changed. Love Island is a springboard for smart, sexy young women (and men to a lesser degree) to monetise their youth and beauty the way a sportsman utilises his skill for that mayfly moment before wear and tear takes over. The suicides of Michael Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon were a field day for loathers of reality TV, but the idea that it was the uniquely empty and narcissistic milieu which caused these young people to take their lives doesn’t explain why, say, farmers — as far from reality stars as one can imagine — have such a high rate of suicide.

There was a great deal of self-righteous crowing when, in 2018, it was claimed that there were more applicants for Love Island — around 150,000 — than there were for Oxford and Cambridge combined. “What is happening to us?” wailed BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker from his cushy billet. But in an age where social mobility is moving backwards, and in a country where the dull spawn of the famous pick up the few enjoyable and well-paid jobs once open to bright working-class kids — actor, pop star, model, journalist — should we be surprised? There’s also hypocrisy to all the shrieking: it’s fun and easy to be paid to be yourself — that’s what we columnists do.

So when the academic Danielle J. Lindeman, in her new book True Story, damns reality TV with faint praise as “a pop-cultural touchstone that… can help us to make sense of complex social forces”, you can’t help but feel her point is decades out-of-date. Today, reality TV has informed all parts of our culture and democratised it, adding greatly to the confusion and gaiety of nations.

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We live in a world where Margot Robbie obsesses over Love Island; where Kim Kardashian retires from her show to become a lawyer and hold meetings with The Apprentice’s President Donald Trump. Then there’s Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have become their very own reality TV spectacle: they are of interest only because they have us on the edge of our seats wondering who the heck they’re going to turn on next. The same is true of Boris Johnson — policy has become less important than whether Carrie Made Him Do It and his ongoing feud with Dominic Cummings.

Faced with these fantasies, both the Left and Right join in condemnation of reality TV’s hold over the youth of the nation, who should be stuck away in their bedrooms studying for Oxbridge rather than having a laugh in swimwear. But as in so many issues, politics has been left behind and the Great and Good can no more hold back the tide of populism than a Love Islander can walk past a beauty salon offering 50% off spray tans.

A recent survey found that those aged 18 to 24 are more likely (42%) than their elders (9%) to believe that “income level is the greatest indicator of someone’s class” and that a major decider of whether one is “upper class” is “going on luxury hotel holidays” and “multiple overseas holidays per year”. The mass exodus of Love Island alumni to Dubai during the first Covid lockdown so they could carry on their “work” as “influencers” personified this dream of being posh.

And in a way, it’s not as foolish as Victoria Beckham being called ‘Posh’ — chasing the sun is what the idle rich specialised in before they had to make it look like they were working. Faced with this new reality TV class, it’s interesting to see how many of the privileged, privately educated youngsters of Made In Chelsea made a reverse journey, choosing to enter the world of commerce rather than cruise on their trust funds.

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More striking, though, was how it was one of the best and brightest reality stars who brought the Dubai influences down to earth. Olivia Attwood — of Love Island, TOWIE and Olivia Meets Her Match fame — was scathing in her mockery:

“So basically being an influencer is actually really hard and I can’t create content for you guys here at home, so I am going to have to go on holiday…. People literally can’t feed their children, and are being given these sad little bags of food from the government… Your ‘hard day’ is creating content that might get nasty comments and someone else’s hard day is a 12-hour shift and zipping up body bags at the end of it.”

It proved that, at a time when real stars of screen and music increasingly scold from the same hymn sheet behind the high walls of their privately-policed gated enclosures  — capitalism is evil; transwomen are women; Palestine is real — the reality stars, unschooled in hypocrisy, can still be a breath of fresh air.

Let other critics sneer at the dreams of ordinary people reflected in reality TV — I’ll take a talent show over a Quality Drama showing the working-class being happy with their place below stairs any day.