I smile only if I feel like it and so should Victoria Beckham

Helmed by Nadia Hallgren, who made Becoming about Michelle Obama, the trailer air-kisses the keynotes of Victoria’s professional and personal trajectory: the Spice Girls! The marriage! The money-pit fashion label! Victoria is seen in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Fashion stole my smile”. She says: “People thought that I was a miserable cow that never smiled. But I do. Don’t be shocked.” Too late, I am shocked: why is a woman not smiling such a big deal it features twice in a 90-second trailer?

I hope the new documentary has a scene to rival the bit in Beckham when David pushed his wife to admit her dad drove her to school in a Rolls-Royce. A moment, I thought, that crossed the line from marital teasing to Mean Boy. (Though, ever the entrepreneur, Victoria now flogs “My Dad Had A Rolls-Royce” T-shirts at £110 a pop).

As for not smiling, for us Forever Goths – VB is one of the pop division – a sullen pout is a smile. Besides, what is this if not the boorish “Cheer up, love!” or “Give us a smile!” in a different guise? As if women are only allowed certain settings in public – happy, sunny, perma-obliging – rather than a variety of moods? Any mood they like, even a full-on scowling stinker. Why should Victoria Beckham have to smile?

The cassette tape could be making a comeback. Artists such as Taylor Swift are embracing it as a formatting option. And now Chinese scientists are working on an ultra high-tech “DNA-based cassette tape” with enough “information density” for billions of songs.

For certain cohorts, the C90 is beyond personal. It’s almost Proustian, tangled up in memory with young love in the form of the mixtape. Arduously selecting songs for the beloved; agonising over running orders over like the search for the Bletchley code. As a declaration of devotion, the mixtape was an aural bouquet combined with a terrible, pleading scream: “Love me, love my impeccable music taste!”

But … 90 minutes is quite enough love, right? Billions of songs is a lot of post-punk classics, even for Fall fans. With the rebirth of the cassette, let’s give the poor old mixtape a fighting chance.

Ooh, a riveting court case: a man denies trying to steal the £270k Banksy artwork from the artist’s Girl With Balloon series from the Grove Gallery in Fitzrovia, London last year. The trial is full of piquant details: the accused’s surname is Love; his partner is called Heart; the artwork in question depicts a child holding a heart-shaped balloon.

The case continues, though none of it would matter if it were Banksy’s fabled graffiti – isn’t street art supposed to belong to everyone?

With eerie synchronicity, there’s another story about a man in Brescia, Italy: a painter and decorator by trade who toils, unbidden, painting over what he considers the city’s worst graffiti. He calls himself “Ghost Painter” and his clean-ups are an “act of urban love”.

Ghost Painter has become a TikTok phenomenon. Videos show him working at night, disguised in dramatic black; a bit like Batman, but with a roller-brush and a can of breathable masonry paint in lieu of a cape. Local graffiti artists are responding with more street art – like a graffiti version of a rap battle. One wonders if Ghost Painter himself is a vigilante street artist? And is there any such thing as socially sacrosanct graffiti – or is it all just something to gloss over?

Photograph by Starzfly/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images