{"id":267209,"date":"2026-01-27T22:17:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T22:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/267209\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T22:17:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T22:17:07","slug":"despite-being-airbrushed-to-death-this-is-still-a-fascinating-story-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/267209\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite being airbrushed to death, this is still a fascinating story \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Take That<\/a> spent most of the 1990s lording it over rival boybands \u2013 but they are late to the party with their underwhelming new Netflix<\/a> documentary, which arrives a year after the devastating Boyzone<\/a> tell-all, No Matter What<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In that latter film, Ronan Keating<\/a> and his bandmates unpacked the trauma they had accumulated over their many years of success and failure while their former manager Louis Walsh<\/a> was cast as the comic-book villain of the piece. It was a gripping plunge into the pop industry\u2019s heart of darkness.<\/p>\n

There is no such catharsis in Take That, David Soutar\u2019s largely sanitised survey of the Manchester pop institution\u2019s rise, fall and surprise rebirth as pop\u2019s very own fuddy-duddy comfort blanket. Could it be magic? Nah.<\/p>\n

Even as a casual follower of TT, there was nothing here of which I wasn\u2019t already aware \u2013 whether that be the rivalry between Gary Barlow<\/a> and Robbie Williams<\/a> or Barlow\u2019s subsequent descent into a hermit-like funk as Williams conquered the world.<\/p>\n

As befits a group that have been living off their glory days for some years now, it sticks to the hits. It also verges on sharp practice by not revealing until the end credits that, while the interviews with the three current members of Take That, Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald, are new, the contributions from Robbie Williams and Jason Orange are from the archives \u2013 and that they are otherwise not involved.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a shame that the programme plays it safe as there is obviously a lot more to the story beyond smashes and crashes. Barlow admits he was a control freak who, in the 1990s, saw Take That simply as a vehicle for his songwriting ambitions. It took the group splitting up and then reforming for him to understand he needed his bandmates as much as they needed him.<\/p>\n

But Netflix\u2019s Take That never goes beyond the standard rockumentary anecdotes about disappointment and redemption. <\/p>\n

There is nothing, for instance, about the 2014 tax avoidance controversy that saw Barlow, Donald and Owen make a \u00a320 million (\u20ac23 million) repayment to British authorities. <\/p>\n

Or the implosion in Owen\u2019s personal life after he admitted to being serially unfaithful to his long-term partner (including a five-year affair with a woman he\u2019d met at random on the concourse of Preston railway station). <\/p>\n

This is a striking omission, as the scandal broke in the run up to the release of their 2010 album Progress \u2013 a mending of the fences with Williams which provides one of the emotional touchstones of the new documentary. That Owen went into rehab bang in the middle of that process surely merits at least a passing mention? <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Review: Britpop is Robbie Williams at his best, an irreverent, splurging Valentine to 1990s guitar rock<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Despite being airbrushed to death, this is still a fascinating story. As a struggling songwriter in suburban Cheshire in northwest England, Barlow had been desperate to break into show business. Which is why he went along with the suggestion of his manager, Nigel Martin-Smith, that they build a band around his music \u2013 and try to break into the gay clubs of Greater Manchester. <\/p>\n

They did all that and more \u2013 yet all of Take That seemed to lack confidence to one degree or another. Barlow refused to share songwriting responsibilities, Williams was an ego built on sand, Orange was encouraged not to sing and reminded that he had been recruited as a dancer.<\/p>\n

The three-part series concludes with the now-three-piece Take That talking with optimism about the future and the film doubles as a handy advertisement for their upcoming summer tour, including a July date in Dublin<\/a>. Fans of the band will love reeling in the boyband years \u2013 but compared to the cathartic classic that was Boyzone\u2019s No Matter What, it\u2019s a triumph of fluff over substance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Take That spent most of the 1990s lording it over rival boybands \u2013 but they are late to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1253,615,93,24826,61,60,102734,1868,24983,1252,24830],"class_list":{"0":"post-267209","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-boyzone","9":"tag-dublin","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-gary-barlow","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-louis-walsh","15":"tag-netflix","16":"tag-robbie-williams","17":"tag-ronan-keating","18":"tag-take-that"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}