It is 1996. The Spice Girls have just released Wannabe, and you can’t believe your ears. The group’s cheek and rebellion enthrals you. You dance to their fast tunes. You snog to their slow ones. You absorb their broad-stroke feminist slogans in a giddy adolescent rush. Fast-forward two decades and you’ve grown up to be a BBC commissioning editor. You’re convinced that Ginger Spice alone can unlock the mysteries of your youth. So you make a show where she looks back and evaluates her golden decade. You give it the ungainly title Geri’s 90s: My Drive to Freedom. It doesn’t really work.
Sure, it sounds fine on paper. Get Geri Horner to tell her stories with the advantage of hindsight, and bonk-eyed nostalgists across the land will go loopy from nostalgia. Kangol hats will be dug out. Someone will put on a Dodgy album. Tim Lovejoy might get an erection. Good times. However, in reality, this show wants to be two different things. One is a whistlestop biography of Ginger Spice; the other a decade-wide cultural retrospective. But no matter how hard the programme forces them together, the two poles never quite mesh.
The main problem is Geri herself. As she happily attests, all Geri ever wanted was to be famous. It didn’t matter how. If she couldn’t be a singer, she’d be a TV presenter. If she couldn’t present, she’d do gameshows. Talent never seemed to come into the equation. She just wanted fame for fame’s sake; something to fill the aching void in her life.
But this monomaniacal self-absorption meant that she didn’t actually pay much attention to anything else going on around her at the time, which isn’t a great quality if you’re going to present a documentary about just that. When grunge is brought up, Geri waves it away as “too depressing”. Oasis? “A little bit too aggressive for me”. This is the show in a nutshell. Movements were exploding all around her, but she was either too busy flipping cards on Turkish TV or railing against perceived slights by Gaby Roslin to notice. She did buy a nice car with the Spice Girls money, though, and we see a clip of her driving it and going, “Woo!”, so that’s something.
To shore up its listing credentials, the show enlists some talking heads to give broader context. However, one of these talking heads is Alex James. At one point, James claims that the Tate Modern was the country’s most-visited tourist attraction in the late 90s, even though it didn’t open until the year 2000. Then he describes the 1990s as “the last great opportunity to be ridiculous”, which is a nice line, except that his most ridiculous moment – air-guitaring through a rendition of Largo al Factotum for Meat Loaf on an ITV talent show called Popstar to Operastar – happened as late as 2010.
The show is less a personal look at an important decade and more a highlights reel. There’s the bit with Union Jacks. And the bit about art. There’s football, Kate Moss, Tony Blair. But then Princess Diana dies so that’s sad. But Nelson Mandela. And Finley Quaye. And George Michael, which is brilliant; but then he dies too, so that’s also sad. On the whole, it says nothing you couldn’t learn from 45 seconds of absent-minded Wikipedia-ing. And in the middle of it is Geri Horner, ignoring everything but her. Saying nothing, but trying hard. How very Geri.
Geri’s 90s: My Drive to Freedom is on Saturday 11 March, 9pm, BBC2
