Television - Britney's Louisiana back story is disappointingly untrashy, writes Andrew Billen Britney's Redneck Roots (Channel 4)

The past 18 months have not been kind to Britney Spears, the fastest-selling female singer ever and one-time pin-up of Prince William. On 3 January 2004, she married Jason Alexander: not, disappointingly, George from Seinfeld but an affable footballing nobody from Louisiana. By 6 January the marriage, celebrated at a Las Vegas all-night chapel, was over. Later that year she wed again, this time a dancer with two children by another woman. At the wedding, guests wore tracksuits with either "The Maid" or "Pimp" on the back. Neither nuptial fitted the image that the media had bought and sold of Britney as the last American virgin. The tabloids, ridiculing her bad-skin days, lovebites and chavvy clothes, wanted to know what had happened to their icon. This not entirely unkindly meant documentary (16 August, 10pm) had a theory: her roots were showing.

They sprouted in a Louisiana town called Kentwood (pop 2,000): redneck hell, according to the film-makers, who hired a local gumshoe called Tim Oliver to ferry them around. He was a talkative Charon with scant regard for Kentwood, a settlement he agreed was Redneck Central. But what, asked an off-camera voice, presumably belonging to the director, John Dower, did "redneck" mean? "It means," explained Oliver, "boot-wearing, jean-wearing, tobacco-spitting, truck-driving, gun in the back of the window, and, by God, I'm the good ol' boy."

The film never recovered from the hurdle of this definition. Britney's parents certainly failed to clear it. Yes, her father's health club went belly-up and he had to auction his car. Yes, his 30-year marriage to Britney's schoolteacher mum failed. But this did not indicate they were trailer trash. Her best friend, Courtney Brabham, did not look particularly trashy either; she seemed rather dignified and loyal. The nearest thing the film found to a redneck friend was a guy sitting by the road in an eyepatch who declared that he had seen Britney naked, "but only when her mother was changing her diapers".

In 1993, after five years of voice coaching and talent shows, the Spears girl beat 40,000 others to join the chorus of MMC, a Disney Channel revival of The Mickey Mouse Club, a 1950s show that, sadly, did not require its Mouseketeers to wear mouse ears. The show was cancelled a year later, forcing Britney to return to Kentwood, a setback overcome when Lou Pearlman of Transcontinental Records had an epiphany at a New Kids On the Block concert and realised that America was ready for a bubblegum-pop girl singer.

Britney filmed her inflammatory first video, "Hit Me Baby One More Time", a moitie deshabillee in a girls' locker room. By 17, she was posing in her knickers on her bed for Rolling Stone. She removed her knickers for a subsequent Esquire cover shoot. When Chuck Klosterman, the magazine's interviewer, asked how she squared this look with her pronouncements that Baptist girls did not hold with sex before marriage, he was surprised to discover that the contradiction had never occurred to her. The virgin/vixen paradox, this documentary hinted, could be explained in only two ways: either by her stupidity or by the hypocrisies of devout but redneck Kentwood.

Back in Kentwood, Britney, yearning for the securities of her youth, bought a mansion and named it Serenity. Now that her romance with Mouseketeer-turned-superstar Justin Timberlake had failed, she married poor Jason from Kentwood. This homely move went down so badly with her financial advisers that they rushed to Vegas to cajole Jason into signing papers annulling the marriage. (Jason, a nice but slow lad who agreed to be interviewed, stuck an index finger to a thumb to indicate the zero financial compensation he received.) Her attempt to reconnect to her past having failed, she went back on the showbiz trail and married the sexually incontinent dancer, Kevin Federline. God punished her with pimples and paparazzi.

The documentary did not refrain from saying that you can take the girl out of Kentwood, but you can't take Kentwood out of the girl. More ambitiously, it declared that "if you want to understand the cylinders that drive pop culture, you need to understand Britney Spears; if you want to understand Britney Spears, you need to go to Kentwood". But if we wanted to understand Kentwood, then this programme needed to do a better job than it did of explaining the puritan-trailer-park dichotomies of the American South.

It left us instead with a serviceable comparison with Elvis Presley, another child of the South who thought he could rediscover his roots by building a mansion near his home. Joe Levy, of Rolling Stone, declared it the same story decade after decade: "They get what they want and lose what they have." As if to prove the eternal truth of this, the documentary - which, despite gumshoe Oliver's promises, got nowhere near Britney or her family - interested itself in a Britney lookalike called Taylor Horn, a young singer possessed of such poise, self-confidence and lipstick, that her caption incredulously included her age (12) in brackets. Britney's success was not going to be sufficient for Taylor; when she became a role model, she intended to be "responsible". The programme's harsh conclusion was: fat chance, the kid's from Kentwood.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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