Posh's TV show backfires as bid to woo America

Victoria Beckham is seen through a window applying make-up before an LA Galaxy
news conference introducing her husband, David Beckham, as the newest member
of the MLS soccer league team in Carson, California, July 13, 2007.[Reuters]

Victoria Beckham's bid to woo Americans has backfired with damning reviews of a reality TV show that she hoped would overturn her image here as a sour-faced diva.

The New York Post called Monday night's show "an orgy of self-indulgence" and described Beckham as "vapid and condescending."

Beckham, 33, wife of British soccer legend David Beckham, arrived in Los Angeles last week in a media blitz promoting the couple as style icons and mega-celebrities both on and off the soccer field.

David Beckham has signed a $250 million contract over five years with the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team.

Victoria Beckham, Posh in the 1990s British girl band The Spice Girls, had hoped Monday's prime-time reality special "Victoria Beckham: Coming to America" would showcase her humor and personality to a nation which has heard much but knows little of her outside pictures.

"I think people will really get to see what I'm really like. I'm just a normal girl from London. People can have preconceptions because of the photographs they see of me and the stories they read," she told reporters last week.

Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times said that such reality shows "rely on a fish-out-of-water conceit but in Beverly Hills she is a fish-in-Evian, one rich, blonde, spray tanned wife-of among many."

Viewing figures released on Tuesday showed that the NBC program documenting Beckham's house-hunting, attempts to get a U.S. driving license and lessons on surviving an earthquake was the third-most watched show in its time slot on Monday.

Some 4.9 million people tuned in, but more watched repeats of ABC's "Wife Swap" and two CBS sitcoms.

"Beckham, who is bizarrely constantly posing even in her own home, offers insights about how major a certain purse is or how her new phone has changed her life," Linda Stasi wrote in The New York Post.

Gail Pennington of the St Louis Post-Dispatch wrote: "To the Brits, they are Posh and Becks. To most Americans they're- who?"

Beckham, who plans to push her jeans, sunglasses and perfume lines in the United States, said last week she hoped Americans would appreciate her dry, British sense of humor.

"If people like it, that's great. If they don't, I'm not losing any sleep over it," she said of the TV special.