BBCiPlayer is currently the home of a short but very sweet documentary on the Spice Girls, and watching the whole 15 minutes will ensure you’re toe-tapping through your lunch break.
‘Spice Girls Superfans’ makes the usual swift dash down memory lane to 20 years ago, when ‘Wannabe’ propelled five ordinary girls, each with a merchandise-friendly moniker, to global pop stardom, effortlessly filling the gap left by Britpop and Take That, and boasting cheeky encounters with blushing dignitaries from Prince Charles to Nelson Mandela. As Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt remembers enthusiastically, “It was just popilicious!”
Peppering these flashback scenes is a crop of this era’s female singers from Foxes to Jess Glynne, via Nadine Coyle and Alexandra Burke, all explaining how it was the girl power quintet who inspired them to put down their hairbrushes and start singing into a real mike.
Clips of videos by Jess and Foxes, especially, prove this to be true.
Was girl power really a thing? Did it have any substance just because Geri declared it so? The jury’s still out, but the fact that these chart-toppers all channeled it to their own ends, fueled their own pop dreams and look starry-eyed two decades later certainly builds a meaningful bridge between the fab five and their arguably much purer singers of today.
What’s not to like? You can view the doc here in all its 15-minute entirety.
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