Brothers grim: on the dark world of Nineties boybands

As anew documentary series reveals what it was really like to ride the pop train to stardom, Jessie Thompson remembers her own youthful obsession and looks behind the curtain

- Jessie Thompson

In Nancy Mitford’s 1949 novel Love in a Cold Climate, narrator Fanny admits that “ever since I could remember, some delicious image had been enshrined in my heart, last thought at night, first thought in the morning”. She makes a list – long, various and ever-changing – comprised of the dashing men who have been the subject of her girlish fantasies, including Lord Byron, Napoleon and “the guard on the 4.45”. And wasn’t it ever thus? For me, between the years 2001 and 2002, the image was of Lee Ryan from Blue.

During the Nineties and early Noughties, there were millions of girls like me, lying prostrate with longing as they dreamed of their own personal pop prince. As new BBC Two documentary series Boybands Forever illustrates, these infatuations were literally like a fever; intense, all-consuming and sometimes prone to cause fainting. Fans were not simply fans – “You’re in a relationship with your favourite member,” explains presenter Jayne Middlemiss.

The show finished production in the summer, months before Liam Payne’s death, but now feels eerily timed (although One Direction – the biggest boyband phenomenon of the 21st century – are not mentioned). “Obviously there are going to be parts of it that will feel more poignant and loaded in light of what’s happened,” says Nancy Strang, an executive producer of the documentary alongside her husband Louis Theroux. Perhaps unexpectedly, the pair were inspired to make Boybands Forever by their hit 2021 series Gods of Snooker, which captured the 1980s craze for men in waistcoats who could hit a cueball.