The Wham! story has everything a modern pop fable demands aside from a satisfying ending. By their final concert, at Wembley in June 1986, George Michael was already on the way to solo stardom while his musical partner Andrew Ridgeley was hurtling towards obscurity at equal but opposite velocity. This wasn’t the Beatles breaking up or the Rolling Stones ploughing on forever; it was two pals growing up and drifting apart.
For that reason, Chris Smith’s documentary about the duo (Netflix, from Wednesday) is doomed to end on an inconclusive note. All great pop stories require a rise and a fall – but Wham! merely became big and then went away.
There isn’t a dramatic arc so much as a grandiose petering out, and it condemns Netflix’s Wham! to feel like the first half of an unfinished two-part story that reached a dreadful apotheosis in 2016 with Michael’s death at the age of 53.
[ The year: 1984 The choice: Late Late Toy Show or Wham! in RDSOpens in new window ]
That caveat aside, though, Wham! is often great fun and brims with teenage nostalgia. Ireland gets a brief cameo, too, with shots of the heaving RDS where they brought their Big tour for two nights in December 1984.
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Above all, Smith’s Wham! is a profile of friendship and opposites attracting. As teenagers in north London, Michael and Ridgeley were chalk and cheese. Michael – the child of Greek-Cypriot immigrants, known as “Yog” to pals – was shy and quietly resentful of his overbearing father.
Ridgeley was charm on a stick: a cheeky chappie with all the attributes of a pop star. All the attributes apart from stellar talent. He could play the guitar and write a tune. But as Wham! became successful, and Yog became George Michael, the singing man-stubble; Ridgeley was eclipsed.
Smith, who worked on gonzo doc sensation Tiger King and directed Netflix’s padded-out and unrevealing Madeleine McCann series, brings the story alive with archive footage, old interviews with Michael, and new ones with Ridgeley (with whom the idea for this film originated).
Michael’s death remains a tragedy untold. But Smith respectfully addresses the singer’s struggles to reconcile his homosexuality with his rising status as a pin-up for teenage girls. In one tense interview from 1985, a journalist asks Wham! about all the girls that must be chasing them. Michael tries to laugh it off, but his eyes are pinched and darting.
The director also draws a tender portrait of the sheer, unlikely alchemy of the duo and their music. At one point, Ridgeley recalls watching soccer on the telly with Michael at his parent’s house in East Finchley. Suddenly Michael declares that he has to do something.
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He dashes off and returns half an hour later, having bashed out Last Christmas. The scene captures the essence of Wham! – two ordinary boys mucking around who just happen to have written some of the greatest pop songs ever.
