Nice girl. It's impossible not to warm to Victoria Beckham on the radio. Picture: PA.
Some things are better on the radio. Both Chris Evans and Jonathan Ross are far more palatable on-air than on-screen thanks to radio's ability to blunt the edges of egregiously rampant egos.
Other things flounder on the wireless. Anyone remember The Wine Programme (Radio 4), and the lesson it taught us? Listening to other people drinking wine, and talking about drinking wine, is not broadcasting gold, nor will it ever be. And unlike football, and cricket, and other team games that involve balls being kicked or batted long distances and so giving commentators a bit of time, tennis is dire on radio. It's too quick, it's too confusing, and you can't get overly involved in line disputes.
Victoria Beckham on Radio 1 this morning with Jo Whiley fell rather surprisingly into the improved-by-radio camp. It helps not to have to look at her or, rather, at the version of herself (humourless, pouting stick-thin clotheshorse) that she presents to the paparazzi. On radio, where none of us can see it, she smiles and is proud of it. "She does smile, She does!" cried Posh, entering into that special realm of diva-dom that permits speaking of yourself grandly in the third person without getting slapped.
Despite the various and extensive nonsense she spouted ("people do vary in sizes" was a particular highlight, as was her dismissal of Spain as "not a particularly modern place"), it proved impossible not to warm to her. She sounded so ordinary even in her most extraordinary comments ("actually", she said of her black-for-Halloween nail polish, "Karl Lagerfeld gave it to me as a  gift") and even more ordinary when she spoke of more commonplace matters.
Spending a week in London, she mooted, meant a chance to ditch "the espadrilles and sombreros", an insight into her extensive understanding of Spanish culture and fashion. "We've got bloomin' judo," she boomed, listing the Beckham sons' many after-school activities. I also lapped up the detail of her children asking her, "Mummy, what do you actually do?" She answered them by repeatedly playing Spice World, and in all major languages. "Mummy speaks Japanese and French and German," she told her adoring off-spring.
Victoria Beckham emerged from the encounter as likeably silly and girly, not tremendously astute, but fashion and family-mad. Radio humbled her, just for an hour, in a way that television and glossy magazines could never, do. For that, we, and especially she, should be thankful.
