Selling Out to Wham!

Whenever Lindsay Anderson took on an assignment that was commercial rather than personal, he did so with considerable ambivalence. An example of this tendency was a postcard that he sent to his friend Lois Smith from Hollywood when he received an offer in 1988 to make a TV series for HBO: “This is my last chance to sell myself – if this 5-PART MINI-SERIES which I've been offered really comes off. I’m not really sure whether I hope it will: look what happened with WHAM! when I last flirted with commerce...”

On the eve of the cinema release of WHAM! Ten Days in China! – culled from footage for the documentary that Lindsay made about the superduo’s 1985 visit to Beijing and Guangzhou – it is a particularly good time to look back at what happened.

When Andrew Ridgeley contributed an interview to a piece that appeared in today’s Guardian, it would have been too much to expect him to comment on Lindsay with any degree of charity: he rightly guessed that, in making his original documentary, Lindsay did not have a very high opinion of the super-duo. But it is a pity none the less that the piece should turn out to be such a one-sided, uncritical attempt to diminish the director:

Anderson twisted his knee at the Great Wall, on only the second day of the trip, reducing his involvement in the shoot, which was largely left to his five cinematographers.

Anderson himself appears on camera in footage used for the new film. Asked what it is he does, he replies, “Well, I’ve been wondering about that for the last couple of weeks. If anybody’s got any idea, I’d be happy to know.”

There is an excruciatingly revealing moment later on when Anderson, walking with a stick, approaches Michael from behind and claps him on the shoulder, while the star is holding court; Michael very conspicuously fails to turn round to acknowledge him.

Ridgeley remembers being appalled when he viewed Anderson’s cut. “It was as dull as dishwater and just not what we wanted as a record of the tour there, so it was just not fit for purpose,” he says. “It was a pretty straightforward and uncomplicated brief, to record Wham! in China. Lindsay evidently was extremely conflicted and would rather have made a film that Wham! weren’t in or wasn’t about Wham!”

He tried watching Anderson’s cut again last year: “I couldn’t make it all the way through – it was so dull.”

Such comments as Lindsay’s twisted knee reducing his involvement or his being ignored by George Michael seem a rather boorish effort to belittle him. Wham!’s obvious mistake was to have hired Lindsay in the first place. Having done so, they ought to have known what to expect. As a famously uncompromising director, with a fiercely independent point of view, he was certainly not going to flatter his paymasters.

But it is wrong of Ridgeley to suggest that Lindsay “would rather have made a film that Wham! weren’t in or wasn’t about Wham!” He certainly appreciated the extraordinary collision of cultures that their tour of China presented. And it was a historical moment that he successfully captured, even if he had no interest in making the pop promo that Ridgeley’s comments suggest that Wham! would have much preferred.

Ridgeley’s inability to make it all the way through Lindsay’s cut reflects his own understandable refusal to sympathise with Lindsay’s point of view, but it does not offer a true estimate of the worth of Lindsay’s original documentary about Wham! If You Were There.... was certainly not up there with his greatest work – after all, the requirement of filming such a pop act, even in China, considerably narrowed the scope for invention. But none the less there is still a lot to enjoy about it – not that many people are ever going to have the chance.