Badge TV & Radio Blog

Have you been watching … The Big Reunion?

A series about six 90s pop bands getting back together sounds dreadful. But watching groups such as 911 and B*witched creak back into action is compelling television
The Big Reunion: Blue in rehearsal.
The Big Reunion: Blue in rehearsal. Photograph: ITV

On paper, commissioning eight one-hour episodes of The Big Reunion must have seemed somewhat ambitious. Can there really be any 90s pop bands left worth reforming? What's that? Six, you say? And one of them has Kerry Katona in it? Hmm.

The Big Reunion should be total rubbish – too many egos, a heady whiff of desperation, 911 creaking out dance routines like your mum and dad at a wedding. It should be awful enough for everyone to tweet about how awful it is, while still remaining glued to ITV2 in anticipation of escalating awfulness. It should be worse than Splash! or the Downton Abbey Christmas Special.

But it's not, it's brilliant. If you haven't watched The Big Reunion, I highly recommend running the gauntlet of ITV Player. Yes, it features Lee from 911 with a combover, and Irish Popstrels B*Witched looking all grown up and sensible. Yes, those Liberty X rubber catsuits are back after 10 years in storage, which raises all kinds of hygiene concerns. But once you've stopped feeling about a billion years old, this is hugely compelling TV; a collection of candid and deeply human tales reflecting the perishable nature of pop stardom, where fame and fortune quickly implode into infighting, identity crises, booze and depression.

So far we have learned that 90s pop stars were oppressed puppets of management modelled on Dickensian workhouse tyrants, who did stuff such as forcing B*Witched to wear double denim despite them clearly looking terrible. Band friendships were as fragile as the rainbow on Abz's unicorn hat, with no such thing as an amicable disbanding. Subsequent careers included selling keyrings or working as a stilt walker, with some finding solace in 10 bottles of wine a day, or staying indoors for the best part of a decade. A lot of them had a really crap time of it, and in places it's really quite heartbreaking.

But for me it's 5ive that makes The Big Reunion must-see TV, and not just because Keep On Movin is one of the finest pop songs ever written (although it is). Despite now living on a farm in Lincolnshire, Abz still has an accent that flounders somewhere between Middlesex and Jamaica. Meanwhile J has refused to re-join the band at all, making them technically 4our. "It feels like J is missing", observes Abz, to which Scott deadpans "That's because he's not here". See? This is TV gold.

With two episodes to go, we're building up to the Big Reunion live gig at the Hammersmith Apollo. At risk of the ultimate spoiler, it happened last week and reports were universally positive (in my Twitter stream, at least). A UK tour begins soon, coming to an arena near you.

Of course this all begs the question, if the fallout from pop stardom is so painful, why would anyone want to do it again? Maybe they're all broke. Or maybe with age comes a touch of humility. A 5ive made up of fortysomethings is unlikely to Get On Up to quite the same degree as they did in 1999, but perhaps a little celebrity goes a long way second time around.

And of course history tells us that, for every band such as Take That that comes back stronger than ever, there are plenty of bands such as Blue who fail to relight anyone's fire. One Direction for Eurovision 2025, anyone?

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