I didn’t think it was possible to love Kylie Minogue any more – her new Netflix series changed that

K ylie, the new three-part documentary that launched on Netflix on Wednesday and has been making me verklempt ever since, is great in every way it’s possible for TV to be. But on the basis of the first two and a half episodes, a couple of things jump out: Kylie’s almost superhuman ability to stay cheerful in the face of intense provocation, and the extraordinary rudeness she had to tolerate from interviewers back in the day. Here’s Michael Parkinson in 2004, grinning like an alligator and asking

You’re 35 now, leaving it a bit late aren’t you?” And a few years later, Cat Deeley, asking roughly the same question, albeit slightly more diplomatically, right after Kylie had emerged from chemotherapy for breast cancer. This gorgeous documentary is a correction to the recent slew of terrible hagiographies (Melania), weaselly half-measures (David Beckham) or empty vessels (Victoria Beckham) that skirt around their subjects, instead offering us a profile in fame that apparently took its maker, Michael Harte, two years to finish and features all the people you most want it to. At the heart of it is the enduring oxymoron of Kylie Minogue herself, a person who, even after all these years, appears enigmatically normal, opaquely straightforward, aggressively nice and still, despite everything, a lovable dork from the suburbs of Melbourne who became one of the world’s most famous women. I had forgotten a lot of this. I don’t think about Kylie much these days. It’s a generational thing, obviously; Kylie was the first concert I ever went to, Wembley Arena, 1990, at the age of 12, with my best friend, Sophie, and her dad. We were those pale, weedy kids on the news – kids from ’80s and ’90s Britain who had never seen sunshine and told owl-eyed reporters we watched Neighbours twice a day, at 1.30pm and 5.35pm, bewitched by the strapping Australians and their back yard pools. Rewatching footage from that era is a heart-thumping exercise – with the added hilarity of Jason Donovan popping up as he is now (sardonic, grizzled) to share his reminiscences over old footage. God, there’s the mullet; there’s the big Minogue teeth; there’s Anne Charleston as Madge in the background. And here’s 57-year-old Donovan swearing and struggling with himself as he admits he was jealous of Kylie back then, a man by turns burned out and hilarious, like something out of Beckett. Being dumped for Michael Hutchence – “look, I don’t have anything against Michael” – still has him fighting back tears. “Love hurts, mate,” he says to the interviewer and I want to say, Jason!

Key points

• You’re 35 now, leaving it a bit late aren’t you?” And a few years later, Cat Deeley, asking roughly the same question, albeit slightly more diplomatically, right after Kylie had emerged from chemot…
• This gorgeous documentary is a correction to the recent slew of terrible hagiographies (Melania), weaselly half-measures (David Beckham) or empty vessels (Victoria Beckham) that skirt around their…
• At the heart of it is the enduring oxymoron of Kylie Minogue herself, a person who, even after all these years, appears enigmatically normal, opaquely straightforward, aggressively nice and still,…
• I had forgotten a lot of this.
• I don’t think about Kylie much these days.