Victoria Beckham has been talking about an infamous interview with Chris Evans that made all of us spit up our tea and run the tape back to be sure the facts were straight.
To be clear, we’re talking about Chris Evans, 56, a titan of the British TV presenting and radio DJ spots in the Nineties, who looks a little like an ageing Ron Weasley — and not Chris Evans, 41, bankable Hollywood star and Marvel’s Captain America.
VB, the artist formerly known as Posh Spice, discussed the media’s obsession with her weight in an interview with Vogue Australia published this week.
Cast your minds back to 1999. In a moment of peak Nineties misogyny, Chris, then host of Channel 4’s Friday night chat show TGIF, insisted Victoria, who had her first son, Brooklyn, with David Beckham just two months before, weigh herself live on air.
As David watched on from the live TV audience, Evans told her: ‘A lot of girls want to know, because you look fantastic again, how did you get back to your shape after birth?’
After replying that she hadn’t worked out at all, Chris refused to drop it, demanding: ‘Is your weight back to normal?’
When she said it was, he persisted: ‘Can I check, do you mind?’, getting her to step on to some scales and remarking: ‘Eight stone's not bad at all, is it?’ This morning, he could not be reached for comment.
Obviously, Victoria hasn’t forgotten. Would you? ‘I went on a TV show with Chris Evans many years ago and I'd just had Brooklyn and lost a lot of weight after,' she told Vogue Australia.
‘It happened to my mum after her pregnancies. It doesn't mean you have an eating disorder. And he made me stand on the scales to be weighed. Can you imagine doing that nowadays?’
The media’s obsession with weight — especially hers — has appals VB. ‘I’ve had ‘Porky Posh’, I’ve had ‘Skeletal Posh’. After I had Brooklyn, there was a picture pointing to every single part of my body where I had to focus on losing the weight from.’
And, appallingly, she still receives snide remarks from all corners. Just this week, Three Michelin star chef Dani Garcia, 46, claimed the Spice Girl had ‘changed the whole menu’ when former Real Madrid star Sergio Ramos tied the knot with his model and TV presenter wife Pilar Rubio in Spain in 2019.
‘She had coconut water, all the time, a bowl of mints and then on the other side hydroalcoholic gel which is very famous now but back then wasn’t because the Covid pandemic hadn't started.’
Speaking to MailOnline, a source close to Victoria said: ‘This makes a great story but isn’t fair or accurate – the most Victoria would have done when asked about dietary requirements is ask for some plain fish and vegetables.’