Boybands Forever hits every sweet spot of the modern documentary. It’s a lively tale stuffed with 90s nostalgia and tabloid culture mea culpas, which means it can tell outrageous stories and still feel a bit bad about telling them. Over three substantial episodes, it features excellent interviewees (including a couple of Guardian contributors) and maintains a nice, conversational pace, homing in on the details pop fans will want to know, particularly this: what is Robbie Williams’ honest assessment of the infamous Take That jelly video, which is even more bizarre now than it was in 1991?
Made by Mindhouse, the production company set up by Louis Theroux, this is predictably well put-together and follows a similar format to its Gods Of ... series. Whereas Gods of Snooker was an expert retelling of a story that seemed vaguely familiar, but polished up and presented in a dazzling new way, this quickly settles down into more recognisable territory.
Episode one introduces the British pop boyband as a successor to the US stars New Kids on the Block, who were, according to the early Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith, distant, unfriendly and removed from their fans. He looked at their popularity and thought something new could be added. All it took was for a young, not very cool songwriter called Gary Barlow to play him a demo tape of A Million Love Songs. Martin-Smith saw that he could build a topless, muscled, dancing kingdom around his protege.
That kingdom was Take That, a boyband that almost didn’t make it, but, as we all know, did – and then some. They are represented in this series by Robbie Williams, which is a bit like asking Brutus to tell you what Julius Caesar was like. But if you want the meaty stories, Williams is the one to ask, as his own recent Netflix series demonstrated. His assessment of his old bandmate and ruthless-sounding rival, Barlow, is fascinating and revealing; an anecdote about Barlow playing the wrong note on purpose is a doozy.
Meanwhile, Martin-Smith explains that he knows his reputation as “some big, nasty, evil bastard” and he doesn’t want it to follow him to the grave: he sees this as a chance to set the record straight. The fractious relationship between him and Williams is one of the best strands of the episode and plays out like a father-son parable that is yet to be resolved.
The other big stars of the early-to-mid 1990s were East 17, the bad boys to Take That’s nice young men, the Bez to their Barry Manilow. Three of them speak here, about how they applied rave culture to the pop charts, their own managerial issues (their controversial impresario, Tom Watkins, died in 2020) and the ferocity of a tabloid press that openly had it in for them, as the reliable TV rent-a-hack Paul McMullan freely admits. The episode begins with a YouTube video posted by the troubled former East 17 singer Brian Harvey, who smashes up the platinum discs given to him to represent a million sales; Williams watches the clip and acknowledges that it could easily have been him. Harvey’s former girlfriend, the former EastEnders actor Danniella Westbrook, has plenty of horror stories about the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that went on and the human cost of those games.
The timing of the series is poignant, coming so soon after the death of Liam Payne, the One Direction singer who, like Williams, went from school to superstardom without a protective cushion of ordinary life in between. The episode covers fame, business and money, all of which keep proving to be corrosive, and there is a tension between the “damage” felt by those in the limelight and the implication that there is a debt of gratitude owed to those who put them there. This conflict makes it a much better, much more erudite series than Netflix’s dreary Dirty Pop, which told the story of the US boybands that emerged after New Kids on the Block, only with far less character.
This series’ understanding of class elevates it – after all, these were working-class boys and marketed as such – and there is a bit of historical context, too, although mainly the big hits of the poll tax riots and Britpop. It lacks the depth of Gods of Snooker, but it’s a solid greatest hits of the era nonetheless. Episode one ends, fittingly, with Take That’s demise, announced at a press conference that is infinitely more excruciating than I remember. Next week, more curtains descend, this time of the hair variety.
• Boybands Forever airs on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
