TV & Radio

The Battle for Britney: Wow. This is a Line of Duty-level anticlimax

TV: Louis Theroux might do the story justice. But this feels like showbiz reportage by numbers

The Battle for Britney: the programme’s major misstep is perhaps to focus on the done-to-death subject of Spears’s conservatorship. Photograph: Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty

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Ed Power
Wed May 5 2021 - 22:00

The obvious criticism that can be levelled at The Battle for Britney: Fans, Cash and a Conservatorship (BBC Two, Wednesday, 9pm) is that it adds to the very frenzy around Spears it purports to interrogate. Spears has herself pointed this out, labelling both the BBC documentary and the New York Times's Framing Britney Spears film "hypocritical".

Yet the biggest issue with The Battle for Britney isn’t that it wants to have its cake and also to argue that the cake is a victim of media hysteria. It’s that it is supremely dull.

The major misstep is perhaps to focus on the done-to-death subject of Spears’s conservatorship, the legal instrument by which her father and a team of lawyers oversee her financial affairs. The conspiracy theory that conservatorship has turned Spears into a virtual prisoner was already explored at length in Framing Britney Spears. And Mobeen Azhar doesn’t add hugely to our understanding of the case as he zips from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an attempt to shed light on Spears’s plight.

One of the most fascinating exchanges is with a Los Angeles paparazzo who claims Spears was in cahoots with the circus that followed her whenever she left the house

That sense of anticlimax reaches Line of Duty levels as The Battle for Britney build towards a court hearing about the conservatorship at which Spears may or may not make an appearance. The big day comes around and … to the shock of nobody, Spears does not turn up.

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It’s the final damp squib in a programme that follows the familiar route of a British journalist who has a long fascination with an American pop star making a pilgrimage to the United States to uncover the unvarnished truth. You will recognise the formula from Jacques Peretti’s work on Michael Jackson or Nick Broomfield’s movies about Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.

No matter how well intentioned, there is always in these undertakings an aspect of gawping at the locals. That cliche is ticked off as Azhar drives to Spears’s home town of Kentwood, Louisiana, and banters with a waitress about hush puppies, a deep-fried regional delicacy. Later he visits a local museum where the curator ushers him into Britney’s childhood bedroom, which it has painstakingly re-created soft toy by soft toy.

This is the sort of scenario from which Louis Theroux might have extracted some pathos. Azhar can only stand and stare.

A smarter documentary might have steered into the bright lights of the media avalanche that derailed Spears. One of the most fascinating exchanges is with a Los Angeles paparazzo who claims Spears was in cahoots with the circus that followed her whenever she left the house. And Azhar sits with Perez Hilton, the show-business blogger, who expresses regret for having publicly branded Spears an unfit mother. "I feel awful. I definitely don't do that any more … I am reaping the consequences of my actions," Hilton says.

It's a rare moment of genuine emotion in a film that otherwise feels like showbiz reportage by numbers.