Take this review – could it be TV magic? Yes! | Take this

‘I “You don’t like cauliflower cheese,” says Howard Donald, 57, prodding at a mound of flowers laced with cheddar cheese as he eats an innocuous meal backstage during Take That’s 2024 stadium tour. Gary Barlow OBE, 55, is horrified. “You don’t like cauliflower cheese?” He swallows between mouthfuls of pie. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Cheese,” his bearded bandmate murmurs thoughtfully. “It’s so cheesy.”

“What?!” Barlow gasps, his award-winning vowels slowing to a startled crawl. “What’s wrong with cheese??

The question is of course rhetorical. This is, after all, Gary Barlow. This is Donald Howard. Along with goblin agent Mark Owen (not present during the aforementioned deal but presumably close at hand – perhaps frolicking in a nearby forest) they take it on. They are Barry Manilow cover versions and Lulu’s crop-covered “collaborations.” They’re of oiled thighs, ballads and a million love songs (“I’m here, just for you, girl!”). Cheese is the least of it.

“What’s wrong with cheese? Indeed, it would be an appropriate subtitle for Netflix’s excellent three-part documentary about the veteran boy band, a heavy-handed wheel of narrative riffing that takes in the last 35 years of the Take That experience. It’s all here: the early ’90s teen hysteria, the string of record-breaking hits, the rivalries behind candlesticks, the perpetual pendulum swing between pop coolness (Prayer) and sore-faced cynicism (Papi), the soul-searching, the chubby cheeks, and, ultimately, the astonishingly successful “Circle of Life” reunion that, despite great odds, proves a success. It is much more than just nostalgia.

However, there is not much in the way of revelation. There are fleeting admissions of anxiety (Howard), creaking knees (Mark), and discomfort with the constant demands of success (Howard again). But there’s little here that we don’t already know, and certainly nothing to rival the emotional emetic that was the former band member and Robbie Williams’ 2023 Netflix series, in which the Rudebox creator rants about fame for four hours while sitting in bed with his pants down. (It’s worth noting that neither Williams nor Jason Orange, who left Take That in 2014, contributed to this series, spoilers.)

Instead, we get a straightforward, unvarnished telling of the band’s story, from their bewildering early shows in gay clubs (“I absolutely hated the clothes,” Barlow guffaws as he takes archival close-ups of his iconic piece) to their unprecedented second coming, a decade after they exploded in a barrage of double-jeans (“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 very fun stuff. Directed by David Bros.: After the Screaming Stops, the series is told through new off-screen interviews with the remaining three, and is filled with archival footage, and acres and acres of stuff, masterfully edited and much of it never-before-seen. There are excruciating early gigs at school assemblies, and there are several overt youthful movements, the latter revealing a startling reliance on shoulder pads and the young Barlow’s uncanny tendency to fiddle with his bandmates’ earlobes, like Silverback relieving his subordinates of fleas. (“I don’t think as a person that Gary could see how he was, or how he was acting,” Williams says in an old interview, and yes, we think, as we watch the famous tax innovator scratch Owen’s dimpled cheeks, completely.)

Everything in the first episode is steeped in that low-key, dreary gray that’s exclusive to stuff filmed before the late ’90s. It’s as if Britain has been put in the sink with a pair of Jason’s skin fragments and turned up in the color of a Crimewatch UK reconstruction. Later episodes take on a brighter hue, but there’s still a delightfully warped sadness to the proceedings, with footage of even recent concerts peppered with memories of Exclamation body spray.

Ultimately, Take That (the series, not the band) offers a point of view to Take That (the band, not the series) that can only be achieved from the point of view of middle age. We’ve grown with them, they’ve grown with us, and despite our ups and downs, we’re all now at an age, the documentary concludes, where we can appreciate how difficult and (sometimes) magical the whole process is. Three cheers for all of us, honestly, and pass the cauliflower cheese.