Remember Boyzone? I don’t really – they merge into a set of boybands making music I’m not into – but I love a good music documentary. This three-part series looks at their story. It takes in their managers, the tabloid journalists who pursued them, some of their inner circle and the band themselves. There’s some nineties nostalgia, a few sketchy audition videos and quite a lot of thought-provoking commentary.
Music features little in the discussion, and when it does, the focus is more on who got to write, sing and record the songs, and how this contributed to the band’s internal rivalries. There’s much more time devoted to the publicity that gave them the fame they craved, but which seems to have left them shellshocked. Louis Walsh, now best known for tabloid game show X Factor, talks about planting stories – some pure fabrication – about the band with the scandal-hungry press. He’s upfront about what he did to get and maintain their fame, a process which sometimes comes across as a game to him. The tabloid journalists who contribute are brutally frank about their jobs. But it’s clear that it wasn’t a game at all for the band, and we see some of the damage the headlines and intrusion did. While we hear from the journalists and the people they wrote about, I’d like to have seen someone at least ask where the unquenchable greed for celebrity gossip and scandal that fuels fame and funds those headlines comes from.
As Walsh probably knows from X Factor, plenty of emotion and plot twists plus a few heroes and villains make for compelling viewing – and that’s what we get here (though, given what he tells us about the planted stories, it’d be fair to wonder if it’s exactly what happened). Both this and the BBC documentary Boybands Forever are worth seeing. After watching them, you might make a decision about what kind of celebrity stories you click on.
No Matter What is available on NOW TV
Review by Hannah Boothby
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