A load of tosh: America's verdict on Posh

It could have been a big as The Osbournes, or so the producers of NBC's Victoria Beckham: Coming to America, had persuaded themselves.

Instead they were licking their wounds after a rare savaging at the hands of the usually docile US entertainment media.

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As one unkind critic put it: 'This diva landed with a thud.'

"These kinds of reality shows rely on a fish-out-of-water conceit, but in Beverly Hills Mrs Beckham is a fish-in-Evian, one rich, blond, spray-tanned wife-of among many," said another.

The original idea was to have a six-part series that would follow the couple and their three children as they moved from London to the Hollywood hills.

Since their arrival in LA last week, the Beckhams have been basking in the spotlight of daytime television and celebrity magazines. There was the sultry shoot for W magazine and a cover story for Sports Illustrated. And, of course, the paparazzi are also chasing around. All this ahead of David Beckham's first outing for the LA Galaxy football team against Chelsea this Saturday, if an injured ankle does not remove him from the line-up

But already Americans may be wearying of the Beckham hype. Even NBC, which has a soft spot for all things British, had to conclude that there "just wasn't enough [material] for a series". So, instead of torturing its viewers over the next six weeks, it gave them an hour-long special, which was broadcast last night on ITV 1. Even in its cutdown form, the show was panned.

"An orgy of self-indulgence," is how the New York Post summed it up while awarding the programme zero stars.

"You will sit there slack-jawed at the gall of these people who think we are that stupid," concluded the paper's Linda Stasi.

Alessandra Stanley, the New York Times cultural critic, was equally scathing. She described the advance publicity for the Beckhams' arrival in Los Angeles as a vast promotional pyramid scheme which came with even more than the usual meteor shower of publicity that surrounds a movie opening. "The arrival is more like a giant PR asteroid hurtling toward Earth," she wrote, designed only to boost the Beckham brand, the ratings of NBC and the profits of the company behind LA Galaxy.

"There must be a reason NBC chose to lavish an hour of prime time tonight on Victoria Beckham: Coming to America," she wrote. "But conspiracy theorists will be hard put to connect the dots."

Stanley's damning conclusion was that Mrs Beckham's insights are not "enough to carry viewers through an hour of house hunting, sunbathing and applying for a driver's licence".

"If she can retain viewers past the first commercial break, then the results will be conclusive: either there is a vast, media-controlling conspiracy afoot, or there is no such thing as celebrity ditz-fatigue," she writes.

Behind this "conspiracy" are Philip F Anschutz, the billionaire owner of AEG and LA Galaxy, and General Electric, the conglomerate that owns NBC.

"Watching Victoria Beckham: Coming to America is a little like watching cheddarvision.tv, the website devoted to the ripening of a 44lb wheel of cheese," Stanley said, although "the cheddar probably has an ounce or two on Mrs Beckham, who is also famous for being thin but with very large breasts.

"'Seriously, do they look that big, do they really?' asks Mrs Beckham during a coffee-shop confrontation with Perez Hilton, the gossip blogger. "They're not that big in the flesh," she explains.

Oh dear. The series was meant to be something on the lines of The Anna Nicole Show. While David raised the profile of Major League Soccer, Victoria would have had a television series in which to promote her jeans label and designer sunglasses, not to mention the perfume.