Why mums actually liked Take That (well, until that Robbie one left)

MAYBE they had reached their sell by date, said the pundits. Maybe? With Howard turning 28 in April? When you and I were young, Maggie - 13, say - anyone over 18, never mind 28, was an object of pity.

But never mind. To cut it for six years as a pretty boy band was a mighty achievement. They've had a good innings. Howard doubtless thinks so too. Howard, poor dreadlocked Howard, whose pierced nipple, fetching leather chaps and jockstrap once pushed the IRA ceasefire off the front pages, badly wanted out.

All he wanted, shame fully, was to marry Vicky and have children But for three years Vicky was bundled out of sight for fear of inducing separation anxiety among the little ones Lessons of history, you see.

Remember when Donny Osmond quaintly announced his engagement ... way back, oh ... 20 years ago? ,No? - well, by way of a good luck card, 11,000 small females cancelled their concert tickets, sent back their Donny dolls and set fire to his records. Take that, they said - sort of and that was that.

There are a few things to remember about teenybopper bands one, they've been around for nearly as long as you and I, Maggie; two, they flourish on the idolatry of teenage girls; and three, they never die, no, siree. They go solo, go broke, go to court, or stage eternal comebacks.

Remember - the Monkees, the Beatles, the Jackson Five, the Partridge Family, Wham, Bros, New Kids on the Block? Remember, for God's sake, the Bay City Rollers? Yes, yes, recall in horror if you must definitely, in fact, if you blubbed over the Bay City Rollers but the boy bands those beautiful, desirable but utterly unavailable fantasy creatures - were actually an important phase in the development that made you the wonderful woman you doubtless are. (Or let's not, be sexist man, though in practice, 13 year old boys rarely sob hysterically while flinging love note teddies, money and roses at other boys).

To paraphrase psychologist Rosemary Troy, what the boy bands did was bridge that boiling hormonal gap between your developing sexuality and the time when you could reasonably begin to experiment with a creature of flesh and blood.

Yes, you used the Bay City Rollers shamefully, to give vent to your burgeoning sexual feelings, with the euphoria quadrupled by the notion that you were really getting up your elders' noses in the process. In fact, what the really clever elders were doing was offering three month novenas that it would be forever thus.

Which, explains why, this week, a fair number of mothers too, went into mourning for Take That. Sure, "the boys" might have simulated sex with a parquet floor and revealed bare buttocks, but if that was the closest their pubescent fans got to SEX, then the Mums were for it.

Here, wrote one mother, was the ultimate in safe sex, "a gentle, occasionally shocking but never terribly disturbing introduction to the mating game. The fact that my own daughter has moved away from such things divorced herself, as it were, from Robbie - is almost as upsetting to me as the idea of the band breaking up will be to thousands of girls. Because now I have to concern myself with the possibility that these bedroom fantasies might, in the not too distant future, turn into realities".

With adolescence hitting little girls over the head nowadays as early as nine or 10, bridging that hormonal gap is crucial. But be of stout heart; there are plenty of them out there waiting to relieve you of your pitiable disposable income in exchange for ruinously expensive concert, tickets, T shirts, scarves, dolls, discs and posters. The market will not shirk its duty.

To you, Boyzone might look like nothing more than a slickly marketed troupe of bad dancers, chancing their arms with other people's songs and exploiting your 12 year old for every penny she owns. But on the other hand, they are pretty and polite and will never take advantage by luring her backstage for a quick grope.

How many non fantasy boys could you rely on to behave like that? And spare a thought for the boys themselves. It's not all Fantasy Towers, you know, even when several hundred girls are swaying outside your hotel room, waving, banners reading "Wave your erection in my direction" and various ones rhyming Rob and knob.

According to Paula Yates - "their Boswell" - they can go nowhere unaccompanied. "In fact, most nights they go nowhere. They use more code names than the Pentagon, a car trip resembles the presidential cavalcade, and planning is required each time they leave anywhere in case a fan is injured in the hysteria that the sight of them provokes."

It may be seductive to begin with, but not for long. Holding the line in a boy band exacts a fearsome price. And Robbie was always the one who was going to mess it up for the boys. "When I first saw Mark, I went `wow',", recalls one insightful Irish TT addict, "but it was Robbie in the end. He was more into girls, more of a lad . . ."

Now Robbie claims he was sacked last summer "for having an opinion". Basically, that meant disobeying the rules that allowed the machine to make its millions - no unofficial snaps, no girlfriends in public, and, for a while, no smoking. Subtle mind games, he says, were to play on the band members insecurities and make them stick together.

"I genuinely believed that I couldn't sing, that I had no talent, couldn't dance, I had no say and I had no confidence. Take That was, always Gary. There was only one person being managed ..." When the tabloids turned on Robbie last June, that was that tossed into the outer darkness, poor Robbie, without a shred of support from anyone: I had to become a normal person by myself.

Since then he has spent almost all of his six figure earnings on lawyers (and what promises to be a dirt digging court case shortly) and can't even afford to buy a house. But normal? If anything, his subversion of the boy band ethos has pushed his cred rating higher and crucially into a whole new, "older" market.

As for the little ones left behind . . . Well, it's true the break up did cause a bit of a stir here and a few fans to go on radio sobbing helplessly. But says one ex true blue: "I don't mind. Since Robbie left, it all changed totally anyway. He was the special ingredient."

We Irish seem to have handled it womanfully on the whole. Irish Childline needed no extra phone lines to cope with the grief stricken. Sure, the break up came up in discussion, says Cian O hEigeartaigh, but no more often than the breaking of the ceasefire, and mainly in terms of brutal marketplace realities.

Now that they're gone, opined the worldly wise callers who could give Louis Walsh a tip or two, the field belongs to Boyzone.

The king is dead ... For further evidence of this phenomenon, look no further than our sad household. About a month ago, tickets were finally booked in a lather of excitement for a Dublin concert by Eternal, a pretty girl band. They cost £124 for eight of us (four ecstatic 11/12 year olds and four do or die grown ups).

Well, the sad bit is that the sad grown ups are barrelling, into the spirit of the thing, rehearsing the lyrics and fuelling the cigarette lighters for I am Blessed come March 13th. The girls, I suspect, have moved on. No one has said a word but a band of pretty boys called 3T (another generation of the Jackson Five, would you believe) is quietly sweeping the bedrooms ...

Does the Point have a refund policy, do you know?