Brooklyn Beckham, the eldest son of David and Victoria, has launched a new television show Cookin’ with Brooklyn which allegedly took £70,000 and a team of 62 professionals to create.
The result is an 8-minute episode that produced a fish-finger sandwich. Brooklyn oversees an assembly of chefs preparing the ingredients, he looks into the camera, totally deadpan and informs his audience, ‘With sandwiches you can go so many different ways. It really does help to be creative’.
Is this show the epitome of everything that’s wrong with our society, as some have claimed?
Brooklyn Beckham is rich. He is the amusing celebrity-child kind of rich. The sort that spends winters skiing in Whistler and Spring bobbing around the Caribbean on a super-yacht with his godfather Elton John. The kind that falls in love with an heiress to a billion dollar fortune and spends £9 million on his ‘starter home’ in Beverly Hills.
It was inevitable that the time would come when Brooklyn would have to venture out into the big bad world and make his own way. If you can call it that.
Brooklyn has gone big. His lack of any obvious talent was as nothing to his inherited ability to have doors opened for him. This makes people angry. As we sit around wondering how to we’ll cope with inflation and the cost of living crisis, the spectacle of Brooklyn pretending on TV to make a career as something other than a celebrity — for the sake, ultimately, of furthering his utterly unearned fame — grates on many of us.
But we may as well shake our fists at the sky. It may be unfair, but it is undeniable: the children of the celebrity rich have more advantages in a world where online name recognition is everything. It is why Prince Harry, a man with fewer GCSE’s than your average supermarket worker, was paid £112 million by Netflix to make documentaries. And it is why Brooklyn Beckham is a published author, has appeared on the cover of Vogue, shot a campaign for Burberry and been paid £1 million to front a SuperDry campaign all before turning 23.
Brooklyn fancied himself as a photographer, and aged 17 he got himself a photography book deal. The photos were a collection of the world ‘through his eyes’. His writing was, er, succinct: ‘elephants in kenya. So hard to photograph but incredible to see’. He also featured a fishing trip with his family: ‘I didn’t catch anything – annoying but still fun’.
He also dabbled in environmental activism, inspired no doubt by the elephants. In Kenya, he met Sir David Attenborough. Shortly after, he did a SuperDry campaign supporting sustainability. Promoting the campaign coincided with COP26. When asked in an interview what he made of the event, Brooklyn looked blank until the journalist explained it was a ‘big climate conference in Glasgow’.
Ever the professional, he remained unfazed: ‘Every day I am trying to read and learn more’.
Then came cooking. There was the bacon and egg sandwich he cooked for an audience of nine million on Good Morning America followed by aVogue tutorial in which he cooked creamy, cheesy pasta for his lactose intolerant fiancé. In his culinary arsenal he also has the squish burger (a standard burger you squish just before eating) and the now infamous fish finger sarnie.
To publicly set yourself up to fail on such a grand scale is, dare I say it, admirable. To invite such widespread ridicule is brave.
Is Brooklyn actually secretly in on the joke, as people often thought Paris Hilton was? Is he trying to reveal how far you can go with very little talent but the right parents in our modern, utterly non-meritocratic society?
I fear not. His lack of self awareness seems absolute — the gloriously unfiltered product of being famous from birth.
Of course £70,000 for an eight minute cooking tutorial is insane and outrageous. But don’t blame Brooklyn. The sooner we come to terms with the truth the sooner we can make peace with it. The celebrity super rich can spin gold out of anything – even fish fingers.
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