Saturday 25 August 2007 9:40pm - 10:40pm on ITV1.

Taking a nostalgic look back over the years and giving you a chance to listen again to some of those classic hits, this documentary exclusively speaks to a selection of the boys themselves and also some of the key managers who masterminded their success.
Boy band fever had taken the UK by storm in the 1990’s, boy bands were living the pop dream but it wasn’t all harmless fun, drug scandals began to hit the headlines and the lifestyle began to take it’s toll. 1996 saw the first major casualty in the boy band world – the split of Take That.

“I was at school when Take That split and I remember people in the hallways crying and help lines were set up” laughs Dane Bowers

“For Smash Hits it was a dark day because, ok, we’ve now just lost our best selling group just what do you do?!” remembers Mark Frith.

The problem now was that everyone wanted to jump on the boy band wagon and fill the gap in the market. “Everybody thought – we can do this, we are five boys, we can’t sing, we can’t write songs but there is gonna be a bunch of guys over there that can do all that for us” says Tom Watkins.

Suddenly the market was flooded with boy bands. The Stage newspaper was inundated with auditions for boys. “you get the dodgy ones and then you’d get the good ones, but you have to go to all of them just to take a chance” remembers Antony Costa.

For the boys who made it all the hard work and time on the road began to take its toll and suddenly by the end of the 1990’s some of the bands were on the very edge of their own downfall. Self destructive behaviour has always gone hand in hand with rock and roll – but now it was hitting the boy bands.

“They did go out, they screwed as many girls as they could, they took copious amounts of drugs, they drunk loads of alcohol and they partied” Tom Watkins remembers managing E17.

“Behind closed doors when they go to hotels at night, they get drunk, they take drugs, they let in groupies – they’re boys” Louis Walsh.

Shane Lynch from Boyzone recalls “I’d wake up, get on the soup, have a few bevies throughout the day, end up going to the TV’s gargled up, not drunk, but trying to enlighten the day because it was so monotonous, everyday it was an interview, everyday was a TV, talking the same stuff I spoke for the last few weeks about the same record, the same tour, I was trying to make it exciting again”

Shane’s destructive behaviour and issues came to a head in 1999 at the MTV awards in Dublin where he famously had a public outburst that shocked his fans. “I didn’t want to be in a boy band anymore. I didn’t want to be called a faggot walking down the street anymore. I wanted to be a hard nut, I wanted to be credible and not in a boy band and I think that’s where my downfall was cos I started to disrespect what I was in” explain Shane.

Another lifestyle pressure placed on the boy band was the idea they had to remain single to keep their female fans interested.

“When we first started we weren’t supposed to say we had a girlfriend” AJ from The Backstreet Boys.

Nigel Martin Smith famously told Take That they couldn’t have girlfriends and had it stipulated in their contracts. The fear that a girlfriend would ruin the band was rife,”we were scared the press would find out we had girlfriends” remembers Shane. “I worried about the fans reaction when I got married” recalls Rowan Keating.

But sometimes it was too hard to keep your life under wraps. Stephen Gatley discusses, “the Sun called to say we have some pictures of you and another guy, if you don’t want to do the interview that’s fine, but if you don’t he’s going to go to another newspaper” say Stephen. Although the revelation of his sexuality did Stephen no harm, some boys felt they had to hide their sexuality and keep up the pretence.

The worst thing that can happen to a boy band member is to fall from grace, as Brian Harvey from East 17 found out. Brian disclosed in an interview that he had taken 12 ecstasy pills in one night and referred to them as safe, “by 5.30 in the morning I was public enemy number one” recalls Brian “The press just went for me… the amount of pressure them press can put on a person I can’t begin to tell you what that done to me, that’s when my life went wonky”.

The life of boybands can be short lived and turbulent. Long days on the road and constant performances can lead to excessive behaviour. Although all of the boybands dream of making a comeback – it is unlikely to happen, unless you are Take That, who in 2006 had the biggest resurrection the boy band community have ever seen.