Wham! 10 Days in China revives George Michael’s pop history mission
The BBC music doc gets a one-day cinema rollout as restored 1985 footage revisits George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s China trip.
By Poppy Nakagawa · Culture Writer
3 min read
Wham! 10 Days in China, a BBC feature documentary built around newly restored footage of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s 1985 China tour, is getting a rare one-day theatrical release on 1,000 screens worldwide, Deadline reported.
The film revisits the moment Wham! became the first Western pop group to perform in communist China, with shows in Beijing and Guangzhou. According to Deadline, the trip was not only a cultural milestone. It was also designed to generate the kind of global press storm that could help push the duo into the U.S. big time.
The documentary is produced by Sony Music Entertainment UK and Supercollider, the Zinc Media label. Sony Music Vision is distributing it in the UK and U.S., with White Light handling the rest of the world, according to Deadline.
What is Wham! 10 Days in China about?
The film uses raw material from the 1985 trip to follow Michael and Ridgeley through concerts, official meetings, banquets, press attention and encounters with Chinese fans seeing a major Western pop act up close. It also looks beyond the band, bringing in the views of the press, the documentary crew and Chinese observers, director Mike Christie told Deadline.
Rushes are the raw, unedited footage shot during a production. In this case, the rushes came from material filmed by Lindsay Anderson, the British New Wave director whose work included If… and This Sporting Life.
Anderson had been brought in to film the China visit, but the original project did not become the celebratory music documentary the band expected. Deadline reported that Anderson’s film, If You Were There …, did not satisfy the band and spent much of its life in the archives. Another documentary, Wham! in China: Foreign Skies, was later assembled from the footage.
Christie told Deadline that the existence of the original cans of film had long been known, though their contents were not. He said the restoration, projection and capture process took seven months before the production team could work properly with the rushes in the edit.
The new film moved ahead with the support of Ridgeley and the George Michael Estate, according to Deadline. Christie said his pitch was to tell a wider story rather than make a narrow celebrity portrait, using perspectives from the band, media, filmmakers and China.
Why was the China trip so complicated?
Deadline reported that the documentary shows the glamour and strain of the tour: official functions, fan attention, stage performances and tense dealings with British tabloids. That tension carried an irony, since the trip’s press coverage was central to Wham!’s push for greater U.S. success.
The film also includes less polished backstage material. Christie told Deadline that Ridgeley and the George Michael Estate supported an honest account, including scenes that showed the performers away from the public image usually shaped around pop stars.
Deadline reported that the restored footage also captures the friendship between Michael and Ridgeley, even as the trip placed them under pressure. The documentary includes a later glimpse of Wham! playing a sold-out U.S. show, pointing to the China visit’s role in the band’s international breakout before the duo split soon afterward.
After its one-day cinema run in territories including the U.S., UK and Australia, Wham! 10 Days in China is due to air on BBC Two in late August. Deadline reported that the BBC will pair the broadcast with a night of Wham! and George Michael programming.
This story draws on original reporting from Deadline.