Robbie Williams conducts this review of his life from bed, but that’s where the similarities to Marcel Proust end. In this four-part Netflix series, Williams walks into his bedroom wearing pants, then reclines and presses a key on a laptop to watch hours of footage he shot or asked others to shoot of his life, from Take That auditions in 1990 to the present day. “I was at the centre of the pop culture universe,” he says with that familiar twang conveying anxiety and monomania.
An endless hall of mirrors in which Williams gets to view himself from every conceivable angle and then talk about seems like his idea of heaven. Of course, the thrust of the series is that this is also his hell – a prison, which he recognises with increasing regularity, albeit through a glass darkly. His response to a lifetime of destructive self-obsession is a more self-aware brand of self-obsession.
