Netflix’s new documentary delivers on its promise of presenting Robbie Williams as you’ve never seen him before, and not just in showing the era-defining cheeky chappy, now rounding on 50, mostly in bed, lounging around in his pants. Its director, Joe Pearlman, brings together hours of behind-the-scenes archival footage, much of it never seen by Williams, and screens it to him on his laptop for his response.
One of the more harrowing clips is a video diary recorded by Williams in 2007. It shows him apparently alone, drug-addled and reading online commentary aloud. “‘Robbie Williams is music for people who don’t feel’,” he says, his face grey, eyes sunken. “‘Rob is a showbiz chancer’ – yeah, I am … ‘Robbie Williams is a shit joke’.”
The story – of a star being built up, torn down and left to piece a life together from the wreckage – is by now familiar. Pearlman has made it his primary subject, having made similar retrospective films with the 80s boyband Bros, the now-grown cast of Harry Potter, and the Scottish songwriter Lewis Capaldi.
Here, what again emerges is a damning picture of the tabloid press, and the toll of living under its scrutiny. Where Williams perhaps differs from Pearlman’s previous subjects is in his complicated public persona: he courted attention as much as he rebelled against it.
By contemporary measures of who is deserving of compassion, Williams is low-ranking, seen to have a protective shield of privilege: straight, white, male, able-bodied. Even so, he’s shown buckling under the pressures placed on him, even as a born entertainer.
Williams was trailed by sometimes 300 paparazzi at a time, in double-decker buses and helicopters. The doco shows him on the phone to the Sun, challenging their “Stroppy Williams” headline. Later he rails against the paper’s showbiz columnist Victoria Newton from a Jacuzzi.
“It felt like every day I would read in print what an abhorrent person I was,” Williams says now. Every attempt to engage or play the press at their own game would backfire. Williams puts out Angels, a song that just about everyone loves, and is sneered about as middle-of-the-road and a crowdpleaser; he attempts something new that (at the time, at least) he believed in, with Rudebox, and is ridiculed.
The prolonged “hatefest” clearly erodes Williams’s self-belief. Often, in footage from the Rudebox era, he looks like a hunted animal. “No matter what I do, no matter what I write, no matter how I sing it, no matter what I say – in my home country, the press are going to fucking hate me,” he says.
Lately there’s been a lot of looking back on the cruelty of the celebrity culture of the noughties – from Britney Spears describing the “constant drumbeat of pressure from the paparazzi” that precipitated her breakdown to Posh and Becks speaking out, in their Netflix documentary, about the hounding that accompanied their relationship.
When I have read press from that time, I’ve been shocked by the unchecked vitriol found printed beneath a byline and a perky headshot. But as much as we like to tell ourselves we live now in a kinder time, I’m not convinced. Compared with 20 years ago, we have certainly established some ground rules: commentary on celebrities’ weight, for example (with which Williams long battled), is now couched as faux-concern or a back-handed compliment.
But while we may have stamped out the most egregious blows below the belt, it does not compensate for the scale of the modern arena and punishing pace of the game. With social media, it’s not just journalists who get to have their say, it’s everyone – and though the press might be less inclined to openly campaign against pop stars, X (formerly Twitter) shows no such reticence.
It’s hard not to get the impression that our media and entertainment industries work to erode our empathy. Watching Williams, wounded by critical or dismissive reviews of his music, made me think of casual shots I’ve taken at people in the public eye. It is uncomfortable to realise, even over the relatively short space of my career, just how many are no longer with us.
It’s easy, when you’re commenting publicly on celebrities – whether for a newspaper or on social media – to tell yourself that you’re punching up: they are rich, they are famous, they have chosen to be judged on their art and to live their lives in public. But have they, really? And do the rewards justify the harms?
I would not want to live in a world where, if we can’t say anything nice, we don’t say anything at all, if it was even possible to achieve it. At the least, these documentaries function as a cautionary tale, warning that showbiz is not for the fragile or thin-skinned. But there’s a balance to be struck – how much a human being should be expected to endure for our entertainment. These are pop stars, not politicians: there are many more just targets for our collective opproprobium, ones where applying pressure could move us to a better, fairer world.
But whether we’re cheering for more or clamouring for them to go away, our widespread obsession with celebrities has minimal power for good – and great potential for individual harm.
It’s all too easy to imagine a tragic ending to Williams’s story, but the series ends on an uplifting note, with Williams healed and happy (though still too traumatised to return to the UK), a devoted husband, and a father to four. But it is all too easy, at points, to imagine a tragic ending. No doubt then he’d receive poignant tributes. For now, he gets two-star reviews for being “onanistic”. But if he’s self-absorbed, it’s only reflecting our obsession.
• Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
