Colin Sheridan: A David Beckham study in self love

Don't expect a new Netflix documentary about the former England skipper to be warts-and-all.

GOLDEN: David Beckham smiles at the F1 Grand Prix of Miami. Picture: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

In 1959, Norman Mailer published Advertisements for Myself, and within it wrote an essay 'Evaluations on the Talent in the Room' in which he filleted many of his literary contemporaries, from Truman Capote (“has less to say than any good writer I know”) to Jack Kerouac (''lacks discipline, honesty, and a sense of the novel”). 

It was a piece of honest writing one would only see nowadays in leaked emails. Oh, how we could do with Mailer now, notwithstanding his proclivity for self-destruction and casual violence (always worth remembering he stabbed his wife, Eva Morales), as Netflix this week dropped into our living rooms Beckham, a four-part vanity project about the eponymous David.