WHAM!

Two London schoolfriends, Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael, form a band at seventeen. Four years later they are one of the best-selling pop acts in the world. Then they play a farewell concert at Wembley, both of them twenty-four. The subject is not success but a friendship planning its own end. Ridgeley is the one who accepts that the band has to stop, and at the centre of the documentary is a friend watching George rise without envy. The form is built entirely on archive. Nobody sits in front of a camera; George Michael's voice comes from old interviews and Ridgeley's narration was recorded as audio for this film. The images were assembled from television appearances, home video and behind-the-scenes footage. The spine of the film comes from an unexpected source: Ridgeley's mother pasted every press cutting about the band into scrapbooks for years. When the director Chris Smith found them, fifty in total, he built the structure on them; pages turn throughout the documentary and time advances through those books. It was released on Netflix in 2023. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties pop and archive documentary. Who it is not for: anyone expecting George Michael's later years; the film stops where Wham! stopped and goes no further.