Take That’s lyrics have always been rich with affecting but generic platitudes like “stop being so hard on yourself” and “we’ve come so far, and we’ve reached so high”. Greatest Days, Coky Giedroyc’s big screen transfer of “the official Take That musical”, finds an equally broad theme on which to pin itself: how the glue that holds together young female friendships can often be a shared fixation.
In this case, it’s a fictional boy band only ever referred to as “the boys” (played by Aaron Bryan, Dalvin Cory, Joshua Jung, Mark Samara and Mervin Noronha) – they sing Take That’s entire back catalogue but, for mysterious reasons, are officially not Take That. Their white shirts, always unbuttoned, billow in the wind. Sometimes they wear leather harnesses. They’re somehow highly sexual and completely asexual at the same time, as all great boy bands are.
