‘I don’t like cauliflower cheese,” says Howard Donald (57), prodding at a hillock of cheddar-festooned florets as he tackles an otherwise inoffensive backstage repast during Take That’s 2024 stadium tour. Gary Barlow OBE (55) is aghast. “You don’t like cauliflower cheese?” he splutters between mouthfuls of pie. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Cheesy,” mumbles his carefully bearded bandmate. “It’s too cheesy.”
“Whaaaaaaat?!” gasps Barlow, his award-winning vowels slowing to a thunderstruck crawl. “What’s wrong with cheese?”
The question is of course rhetorical. This is, after all, Gary Barlow. And that is Howard Donald. Alongside elfin retainer Mark Owen (not present during the above transaction but presumably close to hand – possibly frolicking in a nearby woodland glade) they are Take That. They of the Barry Manilow cover versions and crop-topped Lulu “collabs”. They of the oiled thighs, be-jumpered ballads and A Million Love Songs (“Here I am, just for you, girl!”). Cheese is the very least of it.
“What’s wrong with cheese?” would in fact make a fitting subtitle for Netflix’s excellent three-part documentary about the veteran boyband, a weighty wheel of narrative camembert that takes in the last 35 years of the Take That experience. It’s all here: the early-90s teen hysteria, the record-breaking string of No 1 hits, the behind-the-candelabra rivalries, the perpetual pendulum swings between pop magnificence (Pray) and po-faced naffery (Babe), the soul-searching, the bum cheeks and, ultimately, the bogglingly successful “circle of life” manband reunion that has, against considerable odds, proved to be about far more than merely nostalgia.
That said, there is not much in the way of revelations. There are fleeting admissions of anxiety (Howard), creaking knees (Mark) and discomfort at the ongoing demands of success (Howard again). But there is little here we don’t already know, and certainly nothing to rival the emotional emetic that was former band member and on/off frenemy Robbie Williams’ 2023 Netflix series, in which the Rudebox hitmaker grumbled about fame for four hours while sitting on a bed in his pants. (Tellingly, neither Williams nor Jason Orange, who left Take That in 2014, have contributed to this series, the spoilsports.)
Instead, we get a straightforward and refreshingly unembittered retelling of the band’s story, from their bewildered early performances in gay clubs (“I absolutely hated the outfits,” guffaws Barlow over punishing archive closeups of his chainmail codpiece) to their unprecedented second coming, a decade after they imploded in a hail of double denim (“Fame, for me, is still a real struggle,” sighs poor old Howard, off-camera, who sounds as if he’s phoning in from the passenger seat of his Ford Mondeo).
It’s hugely enjoyable stuff. Directed by David “Bros: After the Screaming Stops” Soutar and told through new, off-screen interviews with the three remaining Thats, the series is replete with archive footage, acres and acres of the stuff, brilliantly edited and much of it previously unseen. There are early, excruciating gigs at school assemblies and there are many candid youthful hijinks, the latter revealing a startling reliance on shoulder pads and the young Barlow’s peculiar penchant for twiddling his bandmates’ earlobes, like a silverback relieving subordinates of fleas. (“I don’t think as a person that Gary could see how he was, or how he behaved,” says Williams in an old interview and yes, we think, as we watch the noted tax innovator pawing at Owen’s dimpled cheeks, quite.)
Everything in the first episode is bathed in that faintly depressing low-grade greyishness that is the preserve of stuff shot prior to the late-90s. It’s as if Britain had been put in the wash with a pair of Jason’s pleather chaps and emerged the colour of a Crimewatch UK reconstruction. Later episodes take on a brighter hue, but there is still a pleasantly woozy wistfulness to proceedings, with footage even of recent concerts heavy with the memory of Exclamation body spray.
Ultimately, Take That (the series, not the band) offers a view of Take That (the band, not the series) that is only possible from a vantage point of middle-age. We’ve grown up with them, they’ve grown up with us and, despite our ups and downs, we’re all now of an age, concludes the documentary, where we can appreciate how difficult and (occasionally) magical the whole process has been. Three cheers for all of us, frankly, and pass the cauliflower cheese.
• Take That is on Netflix now.
