A television series with a heavily controlled narrative is the latest way for celebrities to embellish their image
crunch game against Greece entering stoppage time, the team desperately needed to score, when their captain (Beckham) was fouled about 25 yards from goal.
David Beckham, then 26, dusted himself off, stepped up with his wand of a right foot, rifled the ball into the top left corner and sent the fans at Old Trafford into delirium with a goal for the ages.
At least, that is what Netflix and the makers of the hit documentary about the former England captain want you to think. In reality, it was Beckham’s team-mate Teddy Sheringham who was fouled by Kostas Konstantinidis in the 92nd minute, winning the crucial set piece.
Scrutiny by The Sunday Times has found several such editing sleights of hand and continuity errors that have been crafted into the perfect narrative to show Beckham’s rise, fall and rise again as he became world football’s biggest star.
These tweaks illustrate just how carefully managed a PR exercise this wildly popular documentary is. And how the entire documentary industry is being reshaped by celebrities.
Beckham speaks of his pride at being called up to the England squad for the first time by manager Glenn Hoddle, one of his boyhood idols, as viewers see the national team take to the field at Wembley in September 1997 to play Moldova.
Yet Beckham actually made his national team debut the previous year, 1996, in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, where England won 3-0. No footage from that game is shown; the match we see is the one for which he earned his 10th cap.
Beckham first met Victoria Adams, his future wife, at a match he played at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium in 1997, but clips interspersed through the episode show Victoria with her Spice Girls bandmate Mel C being invited onto the pitch at Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium, where they read out the winner of a half-time raffle. The footage then cuts to Beckham scoring a goal against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge some weeks earlier.
There are also clips of Beckham during his time at Real Madrid, sulking on the bench after being dropped. He is dressed in the Spanish team’s black away kit but when the camera cuts to his Brazilian team-mate Roberto Carlos, the players are now wearing its traditional white.
Then, of course, there’s the “skirting” over Rececca Loos and dramatization of the “red card” incident. No doubt there will be more “discrepancies” to come.
Although it is directed by Fisher Stevens, the highly regarded documentary film-maker (1) and actor best known for playing the slimy PR man Hugo Baker in Succession, those looking for anything approaching unvarnished truth in series such as Beckham will be left disappointed.
(1) If Stevens is so good then the “discrepancies” are not mistakes but (clumsy) attempts to beguile the innocent with a fantasy.
“People don’t care too much about the facts, it is more about how people feel about the story,” says Mark Borkowski, the veteran celebrity publicist. Shows such as The Osbournes and The Kardashians blazed a trail for the likes of Beckham and Coleen Rooney to follow, he adds. “There has been an evolution, and now you have got hagiographies in celluloid - facts and fiction merged into one.”
If that’s what the people want then that’s what the people deserve, I guess … 
