Posh and Becks. By Andrew Morton. Michael O Mara Books. 192pp, £16.99 in UK
Beckham My World. By David Beckham and Dean Freeman. Hodder and Stoughton. 224pp, £16.99 in UK
On his recent visit to Dublin David Beckham, a young man with something to sell, proposed giving 10 minutes of his time to his old enemy, the print media. In truth, the print media was largely grateful for his parsimony. Beckham is so big that he defies perspective. The seeming necessity of his parsimony with the media, is the story in itself. Ten minutes: how glamorous.
Who wants perspective, anyway? Strange it was to be in St Etienne one summer's night two years ago, when David Beckham committed an act of minor petulance and had himself sent off while playing for England against Argentina in the World Cup. All around in the press box as that epic match unfolded, the distracted worker bees of the tabloid media set about their business. They buzzed down phone lines to London, and they flew about the press area, cross-pollinating promiscuously.
"We're going big on Beckham. Regardless. We're gonna kill 'im . . . "
"Roight. I'll ring my lot and tell 'em. If you're going big, so are we."
By the time England lost the game on penalties there was general agreement that defeat was the best story. The hanging of David Beckham could proceed. BIG. He had betrayed the Empire.
Beckham immolated in the media backdraft was a perfect moment of tabloid history. Beckham's wife, the posh Spice Girl Victoria Adams, had a camera trained on her as her husband slipped into infamy. In far-away America she seemed not to realise the implications. Beckham fled the World Cup and joined her there. When finally he came home, he realised the power of the pen - and the damage done.
They were still hot copy. Just a different kind of hot. Now, every time Beckham places one of the football boots he has specially made for each game on to a football field, he hears a torrent of splenetic abuse. He is told that his wife has had gleeful sexual relations with most of the crowd and that many of the attendance wish his son would contract cancer and die. Little wonder he pines for a place in Manchester United's central midfield, well away from the crowd noises out on the wings where he plies his trade.
It's an extraordinary life, made all the more so by the sheer unblinking ordinariness of the people at the centre. The story of David Beckham and his wife Victoria "Posh Spice" Adams is a tabloid-driven phenomenon of inflated banality. He plays football well. She sings and dances adequately. Neither has ever openly expressed a thought of any substance. Yet they are the leading couple of British popular culture, paparazzi magnets.
Ever since he scored a goal from the half-way line while playing for Manchester United as a teenager Beckham has been fodder for the red tops. While several flash young footballers contented themselves with being "linked" with Spice Girls (the red Ferraris of conspicuous consumption, dating-wise) Beckham not only dated one but fell in love with and married a Spice Girl. Two of the great of tabloid culture - the Spice Girls and Manchester United - had become wed, creating a megalopolis teeming with stories and rumours. And (hold the front page, guv, there's more) they made a child together and called him after the New York Borough where he was conceived. Hello Brooklyn. A million tabloid jokes were launched about the name of a putative sibling: Bognor Regis Beckham?
Not since Joe di Maggio was squiring Marilyn about the place has there been such a celebrated union of sweat and style. Unfortunately the glamour is already peeling off this one. We know every excruciating detail of their lives - and on to this bonfire of banalities now come two books, one from the pen of Beckham himself (assisted, as if it were The Book of Kells, by Matt Dickinson and Rebecca Cripps) and another from that vulture of celebrity Andrew Morton. If you are captured by Lebanese militia and chained to a radiator in a basement somewhere in Beirut and forced to read both books, overall impressions will remain unchanged. Beckham seems like an essentially harmless sort of chap who, if left to his own devices, might be quite likeable. Life just kinda happened to him. At 24 he hasn't got much to say about that. He goes out of his way, for instance, to point out that he understands people might be jealous if they read that he and Victoria haveu30 million £30 million: "but we have nothing like that". And to prove it he pours scorn on the suggestion that he once spent u2000 £2000 on a pair of jeans. The u85,000 £85,000 Porsche story is true, though, he concedes. And (words to live by) he thinks a tattoo should mean something.
Morton, the mildly spooky Boswell to bulimic princesses and fellatio queens, has his work cut out in his "strictly unauthorised" opus. If Beckham himself can only wring about 70 pages of text out of his life of generally unimpeachable dullness, what hope has a freelance sleuth like Andrew?
He gets by. Morton does slightly better, pressing Posh Spice into the sort of service her husband would be reluctant to see her in. People worried about her skinniness (gasp!) after the baby, and David's family were hurt that she didn't show for David's brother's wedding (slowly place book on pouffe, go make cup of Ovaltine, digest this news carefully). Her luggage got stolen once, leaving her without knickers, even; and British Airways found her "formidable".
So there you have it. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Two fragile little celebrities blowing along in the media breeze, waiting to be set down somewhere peaceful with all their money while we move on to something else - or a couple of self-centred schemers?
We shouldn't care. Really, we shouldn't.
Tom Humphries is an author and an Irish Times journalist