BBC's Here and Now Programme recently looked into the Girl Power phenomena, and gathered over 500 Spice followers to Television Centre, London. Each entrant was given a survey to fill in, before being able to show what they could do.

  From this survey, it was found that Scary Spice, Melanie Brown, was the favourite Girl. It was also found that 70% would marry when old enough, but 68% would not want to hear the Spice Girls play live!

  Each group-of-five were given five minutes to show off their personality and attitude, and some could sing better than the real ones... Three of the best imitators were chosen as being the closest to the real girls. They were:

 The Camden Spice Girls (Spicettes), five under 13 year olds, who also appearead on Radio One talking about themselves being "rich, famous, and wanted by all the tabloids". The members include Sarah, Ashleigh and Victoria.
 Chathem, Claire, Vicky, Rachel and Lisa in a rather older group (one of them was happily married).
 The Cutest five girls, all under 11 years old (down to 8 I seem to remember...), were also picked as the final set of winners.

  The programme also went into proper Spice Girls copy-cats, revealing that they can get paid over £2,000 a gig! One such group were the cheeky Spicey Girls (from my home county of Essex), who first saw an advertisemtn bringing them all together. They are taken so seriously that they are now 24 hour imitators, and probably get paid even more to keep this up. Nice 'n' Spicey do not take themselves as seriously, and are themselves after they have finished a gig. Gullible punters thought that they were the real Spice Girls and flocked into a London Nightclub expecting to see them!

  Revealed also, was how bloody rich the real Girls are already: each having received approximately £60,000,000! Including merchandise, the group have received a total of over £300,000,000!!!

  Channel 5's Exclusive Programme investigated the men behind the Spice Girls, and their phenominal success, one year after they first popped into the inernational music scene.

  The Spice Boys, who all contributed to the making of the group include: Simon Bullock, their manager; Matt Row and Richard Slottard, who wrote Wannabe, 2 Become 1 and Mama; Ian Levine, their songwriter and producer; Erwin Keiles, another songwriter.

  “The Spice Girls have limited technical ability,” was Richard's comment on the Spice Girls' contribution to their own group. He also said that if they had no-one backing them, they would not exist at all.

  Leanne Morgan: the ex-Emma Bunton was as disappointed as the other ex-Spice Girls, Michelle Smith, when they saw how successful the Girls were around the world. She also let slip that all of the girls (incuding her) needed long-term singing and dancing lesson before going ahead with their first release.

  Contradicting all of this, Tim Keele of Olive ended the feature saying that the Girls were “very talented”.

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   To the left is Picasso's Masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, showing French Prostitutes at rest. To the right is the re-working by Gareth Halliday showing the five members of the Spice Girls as his inspiration.
   The original is displayed under extremely tight securitry in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Gareth's version, with each Girl represented Picasso-style in the famous poses, is held at the West Hertfordshire College in Watford.
   Gareth, whose work has awarded him a merit award said: “I just wanted to fuse high culture with low culture, in much the same way as Andy Warhol did. The original is generally regarded as one of the best of Cubism, but I think millions more people know about the Spice Girls...” No, really?

Article taken from the Daily Mail, Tuesday 17th June 1997.