Victoria Beckham has opened up about a deeply uncomfortable moment when she was weighed live on television by Chris Evans on his Channel 4 programme TFI Friday in 1999. The former Spice Girls star, who had given birth to son Brooklyn just months earlier, said the incident 'hurt' and contributed to years of relentless scrutiny over her appearance and weight.
During the show, Evans asked Beckham: 'Is your weight back to normal?' and then invited her to step onto a set of scales, commenting: 'Eight stone's not bad at all, is it?' The moment, which remains widely available online, was criticised by both Victoria and her husband David Beckham in her Netflix documentary last year.
David Beckham said in the documentary: 'People felt it was okay to criticise a woman for her weight, for what she's doing, for what she's wearing. You know, there were a lot of things happening in TV then, that won't happen now, that can't happen now.' Victoria added: 'I was weighed on national television when Brooklyn was six months old. Get on those scales on television. Have you lost the weight? ... But I was really, really young, and that hurts.'
The couple discussed how the constant scrutiny during the Nineties and early noughties left lasting scars. Victoria confessed: 'I really started to doubt myself and not like myself. Because I let it affect me. I didn't know what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Was I fat was I thin, I don't know. You lose all sense of reality.' She also revealed she had an eating disorder, saying: 'I could control it with the clothing. I could control my weight, and I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way. When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying.'
TFI Friday originally aired from 1996 to 2000, with a brief revival in 2015. The show has been resurrected again as TFI Friday Unplugged, which airs tonight on Channel 4.
