number two for two weeks, giving the Spice Girls their sixth top ten single in Australia. It remained on the chart for 21 weeks, and was certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) for selling 70,000 units in 1998. After British singer Anne-Marie and contestant Mark Howard performed a version of "Viva Forever" on the final of The Voice series 11 in October 2022, the Spice Girls' original charted at number 73 on the UK Singles Downloads Chart Top 100 on 4 November 2022. Music video Background The music video for "Viva Forever", which features stop motion animation of the Spice Girls, as fairies, was directed by Academy Award winner Steve Box of Aardman Animations, the British animation studio behind the claymation franchise Wallace and Gromit and the 2000 comedy film Chicken Run. The video was screened for the first time in the UK on 22 June 1998, after five months of shooting, considerably longer than it took to make the Spice World movie. For the fairies, Box created five 12-inch-high tin puppets with wings modelled after each group member, including one for Halliwell, as it was commissioned months before her departure. He commented that the concepts for the video came from children's annuals, such as the comic strip character Rupert Bear, and from Victorian legends of fairies at the bottom of the garden. The music video's main theme is the loss of youth and innocence, which according to Box, matches the song's sentiment of sorrow. He further elaborated: I came up with this idea for the girls to be tin toy fairies that were like lost toys, which was a little bit of a comment on that modern pop: you buy it, you put your money in, you get your music and then shortly afterwards it will disappear. According to Box, the atypical concept came from a trend in the music industry. At the time, music videos in the UK were aimed to appear on the television programme The Chart Show, which only showed small clips of the entire video, usually the first verse and chorus of the song. For this reason, he was able to experiment with the animation, and decided to place the most elaborated segment in the beginning of the video. Box commented that this allowed him to "do something really unusual, that was unexpected". Synopsis The music video, set in the 70s, starts