Whamageddon strikes againpublished at 17:55 Greenwich Mean Time
Paul Glynn
Entertainment & arts reporter
So Wham! win again, but why and how exactly?
Well firstly, the track has benefitted from being heavily promoted by streaming services like Spotify, Apple and Amazon on their top Christmas playlists – the ones you’ve been hearing in shops since mid-October in a thinly-veiled attempt to prize precious pennies from your pockets.
For its 40th anniversary, the song was reissued on CD and 12-inch vinyl for the final week of the chart race, giving it a further boost as people bought presents.
Physical or download sales count for much more than streams in the chart in the digital era.
Chart expert James Masterson recently told the BBC that last year Wham! “filled the void” left by novelty charity-fundraising sausage-roll enthusiast LadBaby – a five-time victor between 2018-22 – who did not release a track.
Last Christmas “won by default” he said, because it appeared at the top of all the Christmas playlists playing “the same old songs, every single year, in much the same order”.
It was pushed harder this year at least by a new song by Gracie Abrams, as well as another perennial Christmas hit by Mariah Carey, but still became both the UK’s most-streamed – 12.6 million times – and physically-purchased song of the week.
Last Christmas is so popular that it has spawned its own game, Whamageddon, in which players try to go from 1 December until the end of Christmas Eve without hearing the song.
Anyone listening to today’s chart show will now be out of the running. To anyone still in contention, all the best.