Having watched that documentary they did in the early 2000s (the one during which they were moving to Spain etc and only Brooklyn had been born, yes, the one with Rebecca Loos in it, helping them to house hunt in her PA capacity whilst he was already carrying on with her), the things that struck me most were
(1) that she was so predictably ’having a husband and kids and being famous are the most important things in my life’...she was so bloody suburban, like the boring kind of women who start looking for a potential husband at 15 and
(2) he was like an appalling sulky teenager for most of it, and seemed to resent her being there. You could imagine him grumbling and calling her things like ‘the old ball and chain’. They were both awful, and that was with them having full editorial control of the programme so that we only saw their best bits!
The documentary contained a bit where he’s playing in Madrid and she’s in the players’ lounge with Brooklyn and her parents. She’s talking to him on camera and keeps saying, “Hey Brooklyn, you remember auntie Elizabeth don’t you?”, after mentioning Elizabeth Hurley to the camera several times, in a kind of, “only Elton and Elizabeth know what it is like to be so very famous like me” way, so that we all understood that Victoria knew her. It was so parochial, like somebody in the bloody Sugar Hut boasting about being mates with Gemma Collins or something.
I later read that when she first joined the Spice Girls she’d been going out with an electrician called Mark, who had been doing some work on her parents’ house when she met him. She started using his last name at the end of hers, double barrelled, so she called herself Victoria Adams-Wood. Some of the early Spice Girls material has her name like that. At this point, they were engaged, not even married. WTF? Who uses their fiancé’s name before the wedding? What better way to declare that your life is focused on bagging a bloke?