Robbie Williams series an utterly compelling glimpse into man behind the myth

Robbie Williams, Netflix
★★★★

One of the first things we learn about Robbie Williams in this thoroughly entertaining four-part documentary series is that he doesn’t get out of bed for anything less than whatever he earns for a stadium gig these days.

Robbie Williams in his natural habitat, bed. Credit: Netflix

“I’m a hermit,” he tells director Joe Perlman as he sets up his laptop and prepares to work his way through the thousands of hours of footage that have been filmed over the past 30 years, most of which, we are told, he has never seen before. “If I’m not on stage, I’m in bed.”

But he’s also an insomniac. “Four hours of just tossing and turning, and dealing with an amorphous blob of stuff,” he says of his efforts to sleep. “Fear, shame, pain. The whole gamut of human emotions.”

Since the age of 16 he has lived his life in the public eye, he has entertained us and become enormously wealthy doing so, and yet he has been wracked by crippling doubt and self-destructive urges.

Drafted into the boy band Take That as a 16-year-old high school dropout in 1990 – in his own words, “I was kinda thick, can’t spell, can’t add up or subtract” – Williams was full of bravado and soon reaped the rewards that came from being the youngest member of one of the hottest acts in the UK. But he was still just a kid, and it was, he says, “a complete dunking into the grown-up world that I wasn’t ready for”.

Williams with director Joe Pearlman on the set of the four-part series.Credit: Netflix

The well-documented descent into drug and alcohol addiction seems inevitable in this telling. Less predictable was his insistence on being taken seriously, of emerging from the shadow of frontman and main songwriter Gary Barlow.

By 1995, he was 21, kicked out of the band, famous, aimless and utterly lost. That he emerged from the fog of that time to establish himself as one of the world’s biggest pop stars, thanks in no small part to the extreme good fortune of meeting songwriter Guy Chambers, is testament to his ambition and self-belief (not for nothing was his debut solo album called The Ego Has Landed) as it was his talent.

If you know the Williams story, much of what emerges here will be familiar; if you don’t, the arc of it will be anyway, because so much of it is archetypal. Either way, you won’t have seen the footage before, and some of it, like the panic attack he suffers as he’s about to go onstage for one of the biggest shows of his life, the steroid injections that help him get onstage and the havoc they wreak with his body afterwards, the Mediterranean holiday with sometime girlfriend Geri Halliwell, is remarkably honest, even if there’s a sense that Williams is never not performing, at least a little.

Inevitably, comparisons will be made to the Beckham documentary, also on Netflix and also draws heavily on archival material and access to its subject’s seemingly now-settled home life.

But there’s no need to pick one over the other. Both are utterly compelling glimpses into the man behind the myth, even as each perpetuates that myth to some degree. Do yourself a favour, and let Robbie Williams entertain you.

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