Robbie Williams\u2019 2023 Netflix series<\/a>, 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.)<\/p>\nInstead, we get a straightforward and refreshingly unembittered retelling of the band\u2019s story, from their bewildered early performances in gay clubs (\u201cI absolutely hated the outfits,\u201d 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 (\u201cFame, for me, is still a real struggle,\u201d sighs poor old Howard, off-camera, who sounds as if he\u2019s phoning in from the passenger seat of his Ford Mondeo).<\/p>\n
The manband today \u2026 Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald in Take That. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hugely enjoyable stuff. Directed by David \u201cBros: After the Screaming Stops\u201d 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\u2019s peculiar penchant for twiddling his bandmates\u2019 earlobes, like a silverback relieving subordinates of fleas. (\u201cI don\u2019t think as a person that Gary could see how he was, or how he behaved,\u201d says Williams in an old interview and yes, we think, as we watch the noted tax innovator pawing at Owen\u2019s dimpled cheeks, quite.)<\/p>\n
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\u2019s as if Britain had been put in the wash with a pair of Jason\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve grown up with them, they\u2019ve grown up with us and, despite our ups and downs, we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Take That is on Netflix now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I don\u2019t like cauliflower cheese,\u201d says Howard Donald (57), prodding at a hillock of cheddar-festooned florets as he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":{"0":"post-260469","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}