I read this bit in the Guardian review about Guy doing the filming , I have not read it anywhere else. Anyone know if that is true. I know Guy has been off the radar for the last couple few months :unsure:

 

 

It is mostly Williams in the footage, the only other main character being his on-off songwriting partner Guy Chambers (who filmed most of it). And save a brief appearance from his wife, Ayda Field, there are no other talking heads either. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/20...r-in-his-undies

They mean the archive video of the two of them writing and on holiday. It’s basically Guy’s video.

 

That’s why that dries up after the break up.

They mean the archive video of the two of them writing and on holiday. It’s basically Guy’s video.

 

That’s why that dries up after the break up.

 

 

I understand now, thanks :)

Review: Robbie Williams comes undone in new Netflix doc series

 

By Alan Corr

Multimedia Journalist

 

Reviewer score 4.5/5

 

 

"I can't watch this, can we fast forward this bit, please?" Robbie Williams is sitting in the half-light of the palatial LA home he shares with his wife and their four kids. His face bathed in the glow of a laptop, he is looking back on the last thirty years of his life - first as a member of boyband Take That and then as Britain’s most successful solo pop star of the late nineties and at least half of the noughties.

 

Like Williams himself, you may be shocked to remember just how very big Robbie Willaims was. And how much of a casualty of massive fame he was to become.

This entertaining warts and all four-part documentary from director Joe Pearlman is drawn from three decades of archive film, a total of 30,000 hours of Robbie, from the gurning bad boy of Take That, the wild success of his solo years, the addictions and the breakdowns, and his current semi-hermit existence as a family man in LA.

 

Asif Kapadia, who made the remarkable Amy Winehouse film Amy (the most successful documentary in British film history), is executive producer of this latest example of Netflix’s new celeb doc strand and his presence is felt. There is very little in the way of talking heads and instead we see Robbie in real time gazing in wonder and then horror as he looks back on the footage. He describes this series as a trauma watch. And hasn't Robbie always had a good turn of phrase? "The past has me in a headlock" he quips and "I’m trying to sort out the wreckage of the past."

 

He is, of course, the man who could have invented the word "oversharing" and maybe that’s why most of these new interviews were conducted with Robbie in his undies - either in bed or padding around that palatial pile in LA. It’s not always a comfortable watch and not just because of those Calvin Kleins briefs. Williams got everything he ever dreamt of but as his own song says, he came undone - a lot, most terrifyingly at a gig in Leeds in 2006 when he has a panic attack before he goes on stage in front of 90,000 fans and then performs a two-hour show looking like he wants the stage to swallow him up.

From the very start, he emerged as the cheeky one in Take That. Aged only 16, he tried to front it but the band’s wild success and punishing workload terrified him and he began to resent that everything revolved around Gary Barlow, the band’s supremely talented but rather dull songwriter.

 

So, Robbie got lost in the bottom of a bottle and the end of a rolled up ten bob note, rocked up to Glastonbury where he was memorably dubbed "the fat dancer from Take That" by Liam Gallagher. Or was it Noel? His solo career got off to a disastrous start. He bashed out his first album in twelve days. It sold a then paltry 33,000 copies (a figure most modern acts would be delighted with) and it seemed that aged 23, Robbie was all washed up and the smart money was on Barlow becoming the UK’s biggest pop star.

 

Enter Guy Chambers, a jobbing musician who helped the lost former boy bander to hone his songwriting chops and deliver Angels, one of the biggest hits of the nineties. It was a miraculous turnaround and one that Robbie is still clearly trying to process. Back then, he was either hungover or working on his next hangover or waiting for his dealer to arrive. You may be reminded of the opening line of Diamond Dogs by David Bowie, a man who negotiated and played with fame brilliantly: "As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party . . "

 

You could say this is how rock stars are meant to behave but sadly young Rob didn’t think much of his actual music either. At one point he quips, "I wanna write Karma Police, I’m writing Karma Chameleon". He was the Dick Van Dyke of pop but the public seemed to love him. By 1998 he’s back in Glasto this time not as "Bobbins from Take That" but as a star. The following year, he headlined Slane (he admits to being terrified for weeks before the gig and stuck in a black depression) and he also played Croke park in 2006. He does three nights back-to-back at Knebworth - the NME, back when it had fangs, said it was "naff Britain in microcosm".

 

Robbie's pursuit of artistic cred was to lead to the career nadir of Rudebox, a fantastically awful song that was gleefully mauled by the media. The sight of Williams in this series still defending it as a brave and experimental leap forward is bewildering.

 

As is some of this documentary. It is either truncated or spends far too long on certain chapters in Williams’ life which have already been over-documented. Curiously, there is nothing here about his childhood in Stoke on Trent, where he grew up with an Irish mother and his dad, Pete, a part-time stand-up comedian. His years with Take That are glanced also over so that 16 minutes into the first episode, we are already at solo Robbie.

Other than the comedy of errors of how he met his wife, straight talking American actress Ayda Field, his romantic entanglements are given scant attention. He and Nicole Appleton of All Saints ("a less smiley version of The Spice Girls") were an item and going by the behind-the-scenes footage here, they seemed very much in love. However, too much time is spent on showing holiday movies of Robbie frolicking in the Med with Geri Halliwell, a fellow pop star who had also left a fantastically successful band under a cloud.

 

However, this is a very interesting insight into how the music industry and the media works or used to work and a salutary lesson about the toxic nature of fame and the emotional scars it can leave.

 

Now 49, the 2023 version of Robbie Williams seems damaged but in control and utterly committed to his wife and kids. It’s worth noting that the former Great Entertainer’s most recent song was a jingle for a cat food ad.

 

This older philosophical Robster is mostly good company, funny and articulate but the approach here is more is more and what starts out as a refreshingly candid look at getting everything you ever wanted and then sinking into a trough of despond can be a bit of a slog. In fact, you may be tempted to fast forward.

 

https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2023/1108/...lix-doc-series/

Edited November 8, 20231 yr by Sydney11

Loads of great comments on Twitter tonight. Love this one where the girl recognises herself & her pal in the audience at Slane back in the day :lol:

 

 

 

@1722385019958685961

 

 

 

 

I haven't watched it yet -but Jonny did get a mention?

 

https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/celebs...mpaign=sharebar

I hung out with Robbie Williams in the 90s – and saw him unravel

 

Music journalist Richard Benson on the dark, compelling pop star, his troubled relationship with fame and money, and why he’s as musically important as Kurt Cobain, Noel Gallagher or Thom Yorke

 

I first met Robbie Williams in a tatty bowling alley in south London in the early 1990s. Take That were promoting their first album, Take That & Party, and had just had their first top-five hit, but they were a long way from being mobbed in the street. Journalists were encouraged to direct questions to Gary, but Robbie had a strong, somewhat dark presence that commanded attention. He was fooling about with a bowling ball in a slightly alarming manner, laughing and cracking jokes, and it was hard to tell if the larks were an act, or if he was genuinely the always-on “Funny One”.

 

I decided it might be the former, because when we got talking, he was far more serious and reflective than his official persona suggested. He and Mark Owen described looking down at crowds of adoring fans from a tour bus window, and thinking it was all “just really weird”, and Robbie seemed very much like some 18-year-old from Stoke who’d had somehow got on the wrong bus by accident. In some ways, he had: he always wanted to be famous, but after it started to happen, he would develop a troubled relationship with his wealth and celebrity status. The bigger he became, the more troubled – and let’s be honest, more grimly compelling – it got. By the time he became the largest-selling and highest-paid pop star in the world in the early 2000s, he was suffering from a devastating combination of addictions, mental illnesses and eating disorders.

 

And yet the way he came over in the bowling alley that afternoon was how he would always come over, really: willing and very able to do funny, but always self-aware and not quite sure how to be when he stopped. It’s the conflict foregrounded in his new Netflix documentary, Robbie Williams (available to watch now), with its clips – already being endlessly shared and talked about – showing him exhausted and close to breakdown at the height of his solo fame. He has said himself the documentary is a tough watch, but it does finally reveal the real, divided character of perhaps the most intriguing British pop star of the last 25 years.

 

I was interviewing Take That for a teen pop magazine – if you worked in that field in the 1990s, it was inevitable that you’d interview them, as they did a lot of press. I crossed paths with them several times, but back in 1992, when they were just starting to have hits, they were still gauche lads from the North. Robbie (the band called him “Rob”) and Mark were by miles the best laughs to be with, and quite separate from the other three, which is why I was trying to talk to them. Nigel Martin-Smith, the manager who had put them together, came over and told me I had to talk to Gary more.

 

It was clear that the band was built around Gary, and you could see why later, Robbie would be so resentful and derisory about him. At that point, the “band” seemed very much divided into three camps: Mark and Robbie with the cheeky charm and good looks, Gary and Nigel who seemed to think they had the talent, and Jason and Howard the dancers. It would be nice to say that it was clear then that Robbie had the real talent, but we didn’t know then just how good his voice was and when it came to the looks, everyone actually fancied Mark. Robbie’s resentment at that stage was more that of the tearaway for their perfect cousin, but it would get much more bitter from this point on.

 

“I disliked Gary the most because he was the one that was supposed to have everything and the career,” he tells his ten-year old daughter Theodora Rose in the documentary. “And I wanted to make him pay. I was vengeful. By having the career that he was supposed to have.”

 

Robbie seemed more confident and relaxed when I interviewed the band again in the spring of 1995. They were huge now, with hits like “Everything Changes”, “Sure” and “Back for Good” under their snake-hipped belts, and they were generally liked even by people who disliked manufactured pop. It was significant that they had worked hard performing in gay clubs, and were openly proud of their gay following; the Aids epidemic, and the stigma that went with it, was still fresh in the memory, so there was an element of f**k-you bravery that was respected. They were also just so nice. Mark remembered meeting me before, Robbie didn’t, but when Mark reminded him, he apologised (“we meet so many people, you know”).

 

That interview, for The Face magazine, took place on a hot, sunny day in a glamorous photographer’s flat high up in Soho. He was still doing the gags but we had a quite serious conversation looking out over London from the studio roof, and again he talked about all the stardom as if it was happening to someone else.

 

Martin-Smith had worked them hard, starting at 9am through to club appearances at 1am for years. They had pretty much behaved themselves, and by giving the press the access they wanted (Take That had close relationships with the tabloid pop columnists), they kept any misdemeanours out of the papers.

 

Robbie always talked, slightly scathingly, about the media being like a game then. The problem that lay in store was that the mid-1990s was when the tabloids realised just how many sales there were in pop and rock; when he fell from grace, they wouldn’t be able to resist.

 

For in reality, of course, he was far from the cheery, confident chap he presented as. A few months earlier, he had confessed in an interview with my colleague Chris Heath that despite all the rumours about who he had and hadn’t slept with (he joked about sleeping with four out of five of the Spice Girls), he worried about his prowess. “I’m not very good in bed, seriously,” he said. “It’s a mind thing. It’s all very good leading up to it – I’m a good actor – but when push comes to shove, the shove doesn’t push.”

 

He also admitted to having a complex about seeming “ridiculously thick”, and a secret desire to be Bez in the Happy Mondays. The way critics automatically afforded indie and rock bands more respect than pop acts mildly irritated him, as you can imagine it might, given he grew up listening to electro, hip-hop and house music.

 

Looking back, it shouldn’t really have surprised anyone when, in 1995, he failed to attend rehearsals and instead turned up, hair bleached blonde, at Glastonbury, ending up on stage with Oasis. I was in the backstage area that night, and saw Robbie, swigging from a bottle of vodka, and hanging out with everyone. It seemed a great and glorious culture clash at the time, though I remember the snootier rock writers muttering: “what the hell is ‘he’ doing here?” At that point, Glastonbury would never schedule pop acts, and there was a real sense of a divide. Courtney Love let it be known that she fancied Robbie but “had a problem with the pop thing”. “Tell her I have a problem with the ugly thing,” he replied.

 

It seemed that he’d gone right off the rails that summer, hanging out with indie bands and enjoying all the associated lifestyle trappings. My editor persuaded him to do an interview with us, and after an afternoon drinking with him, Bonehead and Guigsy from Oasis, and Ant and Dec (at that point PJ and Duncan), she said he’d told her what he really wanted was to go home to his mum.

 

Robbie left Take That shortly after Glastonbury, and although the band tried to make it sound more amicable, a protracted law suit with Martin-Smith dispelled any ideas about staying friends. At first his solo career was unspectacular, with few sales outside the UK at all, but the bitter feud with Gary Barlow (the two have now reconciled) spurred his phenomenal drive. At the end of 1997 came “Angels”. A gigantic hit, that anthem sent sales of his debut album Life Thru A Lens stratospheric – it is the 58th best selling LP in UK history – and turned Robbie into a solo megastar. By 2002 he would sign the biggest record deal (£80m) in UK history, and a year later do the biggest set of gigs with three nights to 125,000 people at Knebworth.

 

And yet offstage, he was becoming a wreck. In 2004 he caused a stir in the press by admitting he was on anti-depressants (which were widely taken, but not really talked about in those days), but that was the tip of the iceberg; he is now known to suffer from dyspraxia, dyslexia, ADHD, neurodiversity, body dysmorphia, hypervigilance, hyper sensitivity, PTSD and to have an addictive personality. Little wonder that in 2007, on his 33rd birthday he checked into an American rehab centre for addiction to prescription drugs.

 

The signs of all this had always been there. As Robbie Williams shows, his sometimes tortured state took him to the edge: at one point, he reveals, his eating disorder was so bad that he was surviving on one banana a day.

 

Certainly, Robbie is a subject that repays our serious attention, and a man whose travails, although a greater spectacle than most of our experiences, speak to many people who have become victims of their own desires and personality disorders. It’s easy to forget how little talked about that stuff was prior to the 2010s. Robbie made it easier for people to be open about it, and it’s right his survival, and achievements are being recognised – now a happily married and sober dad, he seems to be more at peace with himself. In his crossing of boundaries, in his openness about his mental health and masculinity, and in his music, he has been every bit as important in defining music culture as his overly-flattered rock contemporaries like Kurt Cobain, Noel Gallagher or Thom Yorke ever were. Perhaps what the funny man needed all along was to be taken seriously.

 

Robbie Williams is available to watch now on Netflix

 

 

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/robbie-..._from_Lifestyle

Edited November 9, 20231 yr by Sydney11

Oh yes, Jonny is mentioned - very much so during the Close Encounters section.

 

Not before then - they completely omit Swing When You’re Winning.

No mention of the silly gay rumours either.

Edited November 9, 20231 yr by Kathryn24601

The confessions of Robbie Williams. A new Netflix series can’t explain how the singer’s bombastic, revealing songs made him the self-flagellating poster-boy of a generation.

 

By Fergal Kinney

 

 

At what point did you realise,” Robbie Williams sang in “Advertising Space”, “that everybody loved your life but you?”

 

A ballad about Elvis’s downfall, the 2005 song was the last of Williams’s run of twenty consecutive top 10 singles which began in 1997. Williams joked about the song, deflecting the idea that it could possibly be any good, but it endures as a sensitive and powerfully sad song about fame. “You had that look upon your face,” mourns its chorus, “advertising space.”

 

Netflix, clearly banking on the nostalgic impulses of British millennials this autumn, follow its delicious but steely Brand Beckham workout with a similar four-part profile of Robbie Williams. What Beckham was to football, Robbie was to pop music. Both were markers of the New Labour era fetish for male celebrities who had transcended their suburban working-class roots through populist excellence and previously unimagined commercial ambition. And they both dated Spice Girls.

 

Where Beckham was filled with talking heads and contextual archiving footage, the focus here is claustrophobically tight. Watching Robbie Williams with subtitles gives you a clue: few voices appear except “older Robbie” and “younger Robbie”. Here, the Older Robbie – in underpants and a vest on the bed of his LA home – watches and comments on a cache of previously unseen home video footage of his young and chaotic doppelganger.

 

Younger Robbie’s story begins in early 1990s Manchester with Take That. For any viewer curious about the subject’s upbringing, there is no information provided about his childhood. This means no mention of Robbie’s father, a club singer and light entertainer on the Phoenix Nights circuit who – presumably – was either source or inspiration for some of his son’s showman talents. They were gifts he would need when, as we see, he was sacked by Take That for his escalating benders, beginning an addiction loop that sustains throughout the series. “My career was falling off a cliff,” says Older Robbie, “it looks like it’s it for the Williams boy.” The 1997 release of “Angels” changed everything, but the series avoids any insight into the song and why it might have connected with people to become a Y2K standard of funerals and appear in the Desert Island Discs of politicians such as Ed Miliband to bolster their everyman credentials. Some of this might be owing to that song’s contested genesis, which goes unmentioned; Ray Heffernan, an Irish songwriter, claims to have been paid only £7,500 for his demo version of “Angels”, about his wife’s miscarriage.

 

When the show is interested in Williams’s actual job, it takes his scab-picking at face value. “I wanted to write ‘Karma Police’,” grieves Older Robbie about the song “Rock DJ”, “but I was writing ‘Karma Chameleon’.” It’s a good line, but it speaks to a documentary that is entirely incurious about how Williams and Guy Chamber’s songwriting partnership became one of the most lucrative in British history. Their sad lad songs had an enormous female audience, who grew up and are now pop stars like Self Esteem or CMAT. Both artists have named his bombastic confessional style as an influence: what great talking heads they might have made.

 

Instead, Robbie Williams is terrific viewing if you like the insides of dressing rooms and tour buses. This changes briefly during memorable footage from Younger Robbie’s Mediterranean holiday in 2000 with Geri Halliwell. In blissed-out sunshine and enveloped by blue sea, the two temporary emigrés from fame struggle to remember what to do with anonymity – chewing over chart positions and B-sides by the pool. This reminds me how much more Molly Dineen’s acclaimed 1999 documentary about Halliwell was able to say about fame by doing so much less.

 

In 2007, Mark Fisher wrote that Williams was “the ‘as if’ pop star”, whose performance of irony was an avatar for postmodernity, “signalling – with perpetually raised eyebrows – that he doesn’t mean it, it’s just an act”. I don’t think this is what was going on at all. Watch the footage of Williams’s career-peak Knebworth shows here, though, and instead there’s a terrifying lack of irony from a boy who expected almost total salvation from the stage. He has that look upon his face, advertising space.

 

The series improves, though with the uncomfortable sense that it has arrived at what it is really interested in: what Older Robbie refers to as “the acute breakdown of me as a person”. This series is not above using mental health crises as a cliffhanger.

 

A sober Williams begins taking steroid injections to cope with an imperial world tour. Who benefited from those performances? The film doesn’t think to ask. It’s a story Younger Robbie at least knew from Elvis, with the (genuinely postmodern) flourish of being addicted to his own backlash in the press. He reels off the names of Sun journalists and editors by name in a backstage paddling pool with his on-payroll best friend. Older Robbie narrates footage of himself having a panic attack during a headline show in Leeds. This prompts a full relapse, all intimately presented for our comfort viewing.

 

Joe Pearlman, the director, whose Bros: After the Screaming Stops is a toe-curling masterpiece of the modern pop doc, struggles to find a meaningful story to tell about his subject here. While Williams’s self-flagellation can fill books – specifically Chris Heath’s two excellent volumes of gonzo biography – in Robbie Williams, revelation stops being revealing. There is no context, no comparison: Harry Styles or George Michael would have been a start. When its long-trailed redemption arc shows Younger Robbie becoming Older Robbie, the film whizzes by as though exiting a bank heist.

 

This week in the Quietus, Daniel Dylan Wray warned that music documentaries increasingly made in conjunction with their subjects were becoming a PR exercise in doc-washing. A side-effect of this is missing out on filmmakers who make documentaries because they’re fascinated by their subject. This is replaced, as here, with the smooth surfaces of the brand collaboration. Here, the neuroses of Robbie Williams and the default style of Netflix combine to make an exhausting if sometimes entertaining series that will tell you seemingly everything about Robbie Williams. Except, though, that he was a pop star and a singer-songwriter.

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music/...iew-confessions

Edited November 9, 20231 yr by Sydney11

Good to hear that Jonny was mentioned :) , I have not watched it yet, will do so at the weekend.

So I watched parts two and three today -very much enjoyed them especially part three about Close Encounters tour.

 

I didn't learn anything new but the highlights for me were the Jonny bits from the CE video -which I remember watching many times back in the day - he describes Jonny as "he is my best friend" not "he was" so this gives me hope that they can resurrect their friendship.

 

Other highlight was Theodora Rose - so lovely to see her -what a lovely down to earth, smart, pretty child she is.

 

Will watch part four tomorrow and then will try to watch again over the coming days to see what bits I missed. ^_^

It's number one on Netflix in UK and seems to be doing well all over Europe and Australia but not US.

Guy comes across as lovely as I hoped he would - I think he's gorgeous :wub:

 

and Geri Haliwell too - RW definitely surrounds himself with nice people -which speaks volumes about him.

 

*SPOILER*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bit where Josie was trying to dissuade Rob from having a steroid injection on the CE tour - she tried pretty hard and even Jonny did - but RW wasn't listening to either of them.

:wub:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

For the past two months it’s felt a little like my entire experience of the Nineties has been filtered back through the medium of Netflix documentaries. First, the Supermodels, a gentle stroll through the decade’s defining fashion imagery from the people who fronted the best of it. Then David Beckham, a sweetly euphoric reminder of what modern working-class heroism looks like. And now, Robbie.

 

For northern men my age, whether we like him or not, Robbie Williams is our rich, famous, candid reflection. He isn’t so much a hall of mirrors as a forensic microscope pointed at who we once were and what we became. I always loved him, that unvarnished temperament, brittle proletariat wordplay, sketchy search for self-knowledge. Despite hearing it a billion times, I’ll never tire of the opening four bars of Angels.

 

Every northerner knew a Robbie. If you entered a Manchester pub at any point during the Nineties, you would more than likely bump into one. Perennial show-off, hand-in-the-fire party-starter, funniest fellow to buy a round, guy the girls all fancied. The way we mistakenly mixed-up hedonism with self-improvement? That was Robbie, with a sideline of the nightmarish realities of what happens when you wish upon a star. He was a fabulous impersonator of garrulous self-belief.

 

His diaristic take on the documentary is the yin to the clean, super-heroic yang of the David Beckham doc

 

The TV show unpacks all of this, with a self-reflexive appetite to both indulge and demystify the complexities of the ego. Robbie’s Netflix documentary is the pop star looking back on a life from the middle of it, in a pair of underpants, in bed, wondering why he was born the person he was and what, exactly, that all meant. Like every bloke rolling over in the morning and squaring up to his Facebook memories. The levels of pathos are something else in what can be a heartbreaking, harrowing and somehow, because it is Robbie, still intermittently hilarious documentary.

 

Robbie was the ambitions we once held dearest, of being rich, famous, popular. He was the trainers we wore, haircuts we tried, drugs we took. He was the reason we missed the Jobseekers appointments we didn’t care about because of the nights out we bargained our futures with. He was a trail of regret we laid amid the torrid adventures of young manhood, our representative, centre stage, documented in unflinching detail.

 

Watching him recline on his luxurious bed taking it all in is not easy; the irony of him having a song in his back catalogue called No Regrets becoming steadily so arch you could drive a freight train beneath it.

 

Given his incredible familiarity, not just as Robbie Williams (person) but Robbie Williams (symbolic portal of us), I got a little teary watching the documentary last night. His diaristic take on it all is the forlorn inverse yin to the clean, super-heroic yang of the David Beckham doc. If Beckham was the person every man secretly dreamt of becoming, Robbie was the one we had to quietly accept we really were. He was the exact opposite of all that beautiful, cool, studied stillness that the young Liam Gallagher made so imperviously statuesque, the restless soul you couldn’t help jump along with. The boy in class who made detention fun.

 

His remarkable ordinariness is the unique, strange potency of Robbie Williams, conjuring all of our angels and demons, the men we were before a generation below us began the intense struggle to neutralise the minefield of mental health. Robbie represents a time when alcoholics were pissheads, drug addicts caners, ADHD was “a bit hyperactive” and depression was “being moody”, something your nan told you to snap out of, a deeply misunderstood condition routinely treated by utter indifference.

 

The timing of Robbie’s personal examination of the insecurities and foibles that make him so identifiable could not be more pertinent. While reading some snippy reviews of the documentary — same as it ever was, writers with lofty university educations rarely understood the urgency behind his appeal — I couldn’t help but think of the mawkish tributes to actor Matthew Perry that followed his recent, early death, at an age Robbie is not far short of.

 

Robbie Williams was once the British Chandler and Joey, all rolled into one. If we are to turn the public interest in mental health slowly beginning to blossom into anything approaching practical resolve to help, we oughtn’t reserve our empathy for those struggling until after they’ve gone. Robbie Williams is still the useful emblem of a corner of British masculinity he always was. That’s why he’s loved.

 

Paul Flynn is a columnist with The London Evening Standard

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/gorgeous...s-b1119597.html

That’s a beautiful comment piece.

Netflix success is measured in days within the Top 10.

 

Yesterday (first day) the documentary opened at number three on the Netflix Worldwide TV Chart, number four today (second day):

 

https://flixpatrol.com/top10/netflix/world/2023-11-09/

https://flixpatrol.com/title/robbie-williams/

 

 

Number One in:

 

Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, UK.

 

If he wants to go higher, promotion and general awareness will need to be given to regions outside Europe and Oceania.

Edited November 10, 20231 yr by nirvanamusic

Netflix success is measured in days within the Top 10.

 

Yesterday (first day) the documentary opened at number three on the Netflix Worldwide TV Chart, number four today (second day):

 

https://flixpatrol.com/top10/netflix/world/2023-11-09/

https://flixpatrol.com/title/robbie-williams/

Number One in:

 

Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, UK.

 

If he wants to go higher, promotion and general awareness will need to be given to regions outside Europe and Oceania.

 

 

Huge thanks for the links nirvanamusic :) . I very much doubt he will do any promo . Overall it's being received quite well , I am really pleased for him .

Edited November 11, 20231 yr by Sydney11

Are ‘my shame’ music docs such as ‘Robbie Williams’ the final act of celebrity narcissism !

 

Meanwhile, one revealing sequence in Robbie Williams shows how mental health difficulties used to be brushed under the carpet. Williams tells an interviewer in 1999 that he has “been in a black depression for the last five weeks” but is asked to do another take so he can provide a more positive answer. He does.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/oth...ism/ar-AA1jKrsN

Edited November 11, 20231 yr by Sydney11

I’ve started the first episode and I have to be honest I am not enjoying it at all. Is there other people interviewed at all or is it just all Robbie? It feels very “woe is me, my life was so difficult” so far and with the Take That thing there was no acknowledgement of his part in it really, very much “the management and the boys made me feel bad about not being a certain way” instead. Would definitely have benefitted from his band mates, friends, family etc speaking too.

 

Also find it weird he is being interviewed in his underwear? If that were a woman in her underwear there would be a different reaction to it?