Girl power was the Spice of life
THE opening scenes of the third
series of Sex Education, which dropped on Netflix on Friday, got straight down to business, with a montage of sexual encounters set to the tune I Think We’re Alone Now. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
You can’t be too prudish to watch this comedy drama, which follows the teens at Moordale Secondary School as they navigate sex and adulthood.
But it’s not just nudity or outrageous comic set pieces involving lost
clothes and a goat – this also has a lot of heart.
As it kicks off, Jean, played by Gillian Anderson, is pregnant but hasn’t told the father.
Otis (Asa Butterfield) has a questionable moustache and Moordale has been dubbed The Sex School.
It’s all refreshingly frank and funny.
WHICH Spice Girl were you? I was Posh, which was ridiculous. But my friend had curlier hair than me, so she got to be Scary, and I’m not blonde or ginger and
can’t do a backflip.
For any 90s teenage girl this was a perfectly normal discussion. We all danced the Wannabe routine at the school disco and thought we were cool. It was the onset of girl power and it had been a long time coming. Spice Girls: How Girl Power Changed Britain, which started on C4 on Tuesday, is not only a nostalgia hit, but the complete Spice story – warts and all.
Arriving when British culture was very blokey – all laddish humour, footie songs, FHM pin-ups and Britpop – this all-female band stirred up a feminist movement, albeit a slightly glossy, money-making one.
Scary, Sporty, Ginger, Posh and Baby Spice didn’t just have chart-topping success, they defined the culture, becoming a global phenomenon.
This entertaining series is packed with archive footage and interviews, beginning with their origin story. It’s never not fascinating to see early auditions or stars before they were famous.
At a London hotel in 1994, Geri Halliwell and Victoria Adams auditioned for the movie Tank Girl. They met again three months on at casting for ambitious girls aged 18-23 who could sing and dance.
It was here that talent manager Chris Herbert put Geri, Victoria, Melanie Brown and Melanie Chisholm together. Singer Lianne Morgan was lined up but later ditched for Emma Bunton.
They were to be the girl version of Take That – but “a bit more street”.
There were brilliant insights. Chris blasted Geri a “total blagger” because she squirmed out of early auditions to get further in the process, and said Mel B “came in like she couldn’t give a toss”.
This manufactured pop band went to great pains to tweak the truth, insisting they were friends first. They did become friends though, with great chemistry – their belief in themselves was their superpower but they became almost unmanageable.
Chris clearly still smarts from being dumped by his creation. By 1997 they were the best-selling girl group of all time. They were everywhere. You couldn’t buy a can of Pepsi or a packet of crisps without seeing their faces.
There was backlash to the endless marketing but also footage of little girls talking about friendship and solidarity, and Mel B raging at a male camera crew for demanding cleavage. Calling out sexism was suddenly cool.
When they dumped manager Simon Fuller, it fuelled the narrative that they didn’t need men.
Spice Mania was unstoppable. A reminder the Spice Girls brought much more to the table than zig-a-zig-ahh.