The Rest Is Entertainment - Brooklyn Beckham’s Explosive Statement

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

After Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram story bombshell last night, join Marina Hyde for her take on the latest development in the Beckham’s family feud. WIN TICKETS TO 'THE TRAITORS LIVE EXPERIENCE': To celebrate the launch of the new series of The Traitors we’re giving you and a friend the chance to get a taste of the ultimate game of deception and tactics. Sign up to our free newsletter by visiting ⁠therestisentertainment.com⁠ and you’ll be automatically entered into our competition to win two tickets to The Traitors Live Experience in central London. T&Cs Apply. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Joey McCarthy & Imee Marriott Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Bex Tyrrell Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to this unscheduled episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde, and not Richard Osmond, because there have been developments in the world of Brooklyn Beckham and his parents, David and Victoria Beckham. Is this one of the wars that Donald Trump can end? It is certainly a distraction from other wars he might be about to start. So let's do a recap. On Monday evening, Brooklyn Beckham took to his Instagram to break up. a silence in his eyes. He unleashed a long, long diatribe against his parents, David and Victoria Beckham, essentially saying that there was a rift with them, which we already knew, but he confirms it and says he doesn't want to reconcile with them, that they have controlled him all his life, that they've treated him essentially as a sort of commercial prop, and that he has been

used and abused, and all they care about is Brand Beckham and people in the family turning up for photo opportunities and having to drop everything and having to, that love in the family is decided upon by how many, how you speak to each other across social media. It's all a really horrible blow up. I should say from the start, I think it's absolutely dreadful and I'm very, very sorry and I do hope it's salvageable, not by Donald Trump, obviously, because I don't think he will end this war. But it's interesting because it does come for 30 years, the Beckett, almost 30 years, the beckhams have been wanting us to watch their show. They've commodified Brooklyn since he was a fetus.

The story of Victoria's pregnancy was sold to OK magazine. The first pictures after he was born was sold to OK magazine. And then Richard Desmond, who was the former prior to OK magazine, spoke in his autobiography about cooking up different things almost every week with them trying to come up with new features. And there was always a big check involved. They sold their wedding. They sold all the stories of their children's pregnancies.

Essentially, to some degree, he is right. He has been commodified all his life, Brooklyn Beckham. I do, by the way, truly believe that the Beckham's love their children, but it has been quite a performative way of showing it very often. And I think perhaps now he's got married into a different family that doesn't do business in this way. He started to notice the oddness of this. Because let's not forget, this is a completely weird way to live your life.

If you love your child, why can't you? Why don't you just turn to that child and say, I love you? Why must you take a picture of that child, as the Beckham so often do, write a caption to that child, send it up via Mark Zuckerberg satellites, and then disseminate it across the world, perhaps to tell that you love them, but also really in some kind of slightly convoluted way to support your business interests, because Brand Beckham is a business and the family, it became a family business, two became six. the way that the Beckham's had always worked together,

they were more than the sum of their parts, Victoria and David Beckham when they got together and she was a spice girl and he was a man United footballer. In a weird way at the time, people used to say, oh, there are new royal family now. There are new kings and queens. They sat on thrones at their wedding and people always said, you see, this is our royalty now.

We don't need the old ways. And isn't it strange how in a weird way the story of the House of Beckham has tracked the story of the House of Windsor and you find people who can't really be involved in these front-facing and, lives in the same way. Although I must say everything that is in Brooklyn Beckham's Instagram post are actually things we already know. We know about them from off the record

briefings. And I assume we can only know those things from Brooklyn and Nicola's camp because they play in the favour of Brooklyn and his wife. But it is just, I mean, there are certain kind of slightly ridiculous details that even though it's obviously dreadful, you can't help half out. Mark Anthony. Mark Anthony seems to have been some sort of master of ceremonies at the Pelt's Brooklyn wedding. According to Brooklyn's account of this, he, instead of Brooklyn and his wife

being able to have the first dance, Brooklyn was summoned to the stage where Victoria was waiting and she danced inappropriately on him, whatever that may mean. Nicola ran out crying and everybody had to sort of pick up the pizza. I mean, Mark Anthony,

nobody's heard this celebrity's name for 10 years, so he must be thinking, oh my God, have I been ragged into this? The thing is, we know all of these stories because they have all been leaked into the public domain, but to hear them from the horse's mouth is clearly something different. We have never heard of any of these in the Beckham's, any of the Beckham families, very managed accounts of their lives. And remember how managed they are. They epitomise something about our age,

where that kind of idea of objectivity has been sacrificed on the altar of sort of commercial vanity to some degree. Beckham's documentary, David Beckham's documentary for Netflix, which was huge, which won Emmys, was a documentary commissioned by its own subject, and on which that own subject served as an executive producer. And when it came to the stories of David Beckham's affair, or even affairs, if you believe, all the reports, which they've never legally challenged, why were they covered in such a manner where there were these kind of slightly falsely put together newspaper headlines and they were brushed away? when it came to Victoria's documentary, also commissioned by its own subject,

effectively an advertorial, and also something on which its own subject served as an executive producer on. These are not objective documentaries. These are adverts. I thought, well, how will they manage this? Because by then we knew there was a feud with Brooklyn, and we knew in what's become the modern way

for people finding out, which is that people had stopped liking each other on social media, they'd stop liking each other's posts. They'd stop basically joining in the big concerns, performance of the Beckham family, where everyone must speak across the social media airwaves to each other, and everyone must like everyone else's things, and everyone must turn up to everyone else's things. There's a presenteism that is clearly there, which is quite impressive, because if you ever

tried to get kids to turn up to anything, it's actually quite difficult. But Victoria's documentary mentioned absolutely none of this. To hear Brooklyn tell it, they have continued to brief against him, Victoria and David. I'm not sure perhaps they're, for my money, I think they've probably tried to sort of retaliation. to other stories, but clearly they have lived their life. And I think anybody who is on social media, including people who are completely unknown, it is always, always a devil's bargain. And sometimes the devil collects on that deal. And that's what's happened here. If you insist on living all of your life out loud, then eventually even your arguments are going to become

public. And that is clearly what has happened here. In terms of how it compares to other sort of feeding frenzy, celebrity scandals like Wagatha Christie, um, Well, that was really someone being caught bang to rights, Wagner Christie, wasn't it? And it didn't appear to be freighted with such emotional damage. I mean, I think family rifts are, you know, often understandable, but always tragic and always filled with great and terrible sadness. Colleen doing a little bit of detective work and isolating Rebecca Vardy's account is of a different order to someone saying, I have been commodified my whole life, I have been a commercial tool. Nobody stopped this happening to me.

You know, he's on the point of alleging a form of abuse, which I'm sure David and Victoria Beckham would think, but we did everything for you. And, you know, in their way they have done, it's very difficult with second generation anybody. They came from completely different, atypical careers in the British workforce. You know, amazing football,

a generationally talented footballer and pop star for a generationally kind of era-defining band. It's quite difficult to know what those two people, when they come together and become even more than the sum of their parts, what they suggest their children do with their life, if those children are not necessarily going to, and I'm speaking about the boys here, I don't think are particularly academic.

And the things that they've been encouraged into, I mean, there are so many different things, maybe future tennis star, future football star, photographer, pop star, it might have been kind of, if the beckhams could even have conceived of worlds that were away from the public eye and that they could have had normal lives. But I think it's, I think they've sort of lost the ability to imagine what normal life is. As I say, I don't think it is normal to tell your children that you

love them across social media. Yet they're far from the only people doing it. When they started out, the beckhams, we had celebrities and we had everybody else and there were tears within celebrities. There were even said listers. But we didn't have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people out there in this world, commodifying their lives. I'm talking about influencer culture, commodifying their lives in some ways being a much, much lower rung version of the Beckham's, having personal brands, lifestyle being your content, and the business being you. And I have to say that from what we know about social media now, every single person who is on it, the product is you. So to some degree, Instagram has become everyone's unpaid magazine deal.

I'm not saying everybody. I personally have never put a single picture of any of my children or anything from my private life ever on Facebook or Instagram. I've never put them on that I've never had those accounts. But I am not typical. I am an outlier. And everyone, almost everyone I knew had those accounts, Facebook back in the day and then now Instagram. And for a long time, people put everything on it. And I think that everybody didn't really understand what was happening.

And to some extent, the best. who embraced that. Once they'd finished selling all the magazines deals, they became, I had much clever advisors who said, hang on, we can build you an international brand. But actually, all of the things you have, the football club, the makeup line, that everything will flow through and effectively be marketed via the prism of your family. Brand Beckham is a family brand. And that's why they have sublimated all their personal life and they give you glimpses of their house and they're constantly posting videos at themselves. It's really all in service. of their financial endeavours.

And it's very difficult to argue that it isn't because honestly most people who are that rich and famous don't put everything online, but the beckhams do. And in some ways, perhaps they're most comparable in that way to that managed public-facing outlook to the royal family. And perhaps the attendant sadnesses and schisms and dysfunctional dynamics have crept in because of that

because it's quite easy when you step away from it all to think, hang on a second, you sold me the story of my, of when I was just a fetus, you stole my, you sold my birth story, you sold everything. And it's quite difficult not to think, because also children are terribly ungrateful and we know they are, that you've done something quite odd. And they have done something quite odd. None of this was a way that anyone lived 30 years ago. All of this is new. Humans are adjusting to these huge changes. And actually the people who profit from all of these things and have been, apart from the beckhams who have accrued a sort of half a billion fortune from their business activities, really social media has been the entity that has profited from all of this because the world and his wife funnels all of their activity through the pipes of these companies. And they'd mostly, by and large, unless they're the beckhams, do it for free.

And the people who make money are the tech lords in Silicon Valley. In terms of what's next, I mean, David Beckham has already been seen since this story broke because he was in Davos. Now, if that isn't the sort of the denouement of many of many of the dysfunctional strands in our culture, I don't know what it is. Apparently he was recording a podcast about regret at the World Economic Forum. There we go. I think there's quite a lot about our culture to unpick there. I think that they will release some kind of statement and it will be very simple and it will say something like. like we completely adore our son.

We always will and there will always be a place for him and our family. And the sort of awful thing is, is that that will work. And I can imagine their team saying, you know, that's great. It's really sort of authentic. And yet hasn't even that word authentic becomes something that means something else now? It means, oh, you're able to kind of monetize an easy charm. You're able to make staged performative situations seem natural. and you just seem real.

But normally, whenever you see that term use authentic, it's saying people like them because they're authentic. What they mean is people pay for their product because they're authentic, whether it be YouTubers or podcasters or anything, people use that word and they mean something different than it used to mean 30 years ago. The question is whether he will be able to stop speaking out or whether, as somebody who maybe his primary career isn't going that well, a little bit like Prince Harry will feel it was cathartic to say it once,

now I'll do a book, now I'll do all these other things. And really, the question is, what does it mean for their wider brand? How can you say, how can you say our whole, all of our enterprises ultimately come back to our family when there's one elephant in the room, as it were? Well, thank you so much for that. And I know that Richard and I will inevitably be talking about the latest developers in this when we come to next week. But before then, we'll see you on Thursday.