Wham! 10 Days in China

Historians will claim that Richard Nixon opened China, but as this knotty, celebratory and rather moving doc makes pretty clear, it was actually a pair of big-haired Brits singing ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ that got the whole Sino-Western rapprochement thing going.  

When they were flown into communist China in April 1985, part of a PR wheeze cooked up by their manager Simon Napier-Bell, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were the fresh faces behind one of the world’s biggest pop bands, Wham!. They were there, perversely, to help launch them in the US, where their two showcase gigs – in Beijing and Guangzhou – and a host of awkward formal engagements and photo opps would propel them onto American TV news.

That was the theory, at least. But as director Mike Christie’s fascinating documentary reveals, there was a much richer, stranger and more complicated reality in the week-and-a-bit the two confused celebrities spent behind the Bamboo Curtain. At first, Michael, looking barely more than a teenager and struggling to find a foil for his flamboyant persona amid all the dour-faced dignitaries, seems amused by the procession of functions and photocalls at the Great Wall. Ridgeley cuts a more circumspect figure, at odds with the hacks from the British tabloids who follow the band everywhere. It’s like watching a man on a pub crawl with a bunch of people he really hates, and no alcohol. 

Ridgeley gamely revisits the highs and lows of the trip as one of the talking head interviewees Christie persuades to spill the tea. His old tabloid adversaries appear on camera too, unrepentant and still fond of using the phrase ‘fair game’ to describe their side of this PR business. A near-tragedy later in the tour brings the tension into stark relief, the band dealing with the fallout as the red tops go to town on the story. 

It’s like watching a man on a pub crawl with a bunch of people he really hates, and no alcohol

All the footage is digitally transferred from the bones of the fly-on-the-wall documentary rashly commissioned by Napier-Bell’s co-manager, Jazz Summers, that never saw the light of day. British new wave great Lindsay Anderson, the filmmaker behind If…. and O Lucky Man!, managed to tame Richard Harris and Malcolm McDowell but meets his match in the Wham! lads, who treat him with barely disguised contempt as he tries to get them on camera. The feeling was more than mutual. Anderson’s lost documentary adds a bitter, melancholy note to the story. 

10 Days in China is not made specifically for Wham! fans, although the gig footage showcases the band at their exuberant ‘Careless Whisper’ and ‘Freedom’-era peak. Where it really sings is in revealing the unexpected legacy of this legendary tour. Christie and his team track down a handful of Chinese people who attended the gigs and discovers lives altered for good by those two-odd hours of kitsch pop heaven. Michael and Ridgeley would soon go their separate ways and Wham! eventually became a byword for ’80s wedding disco cheese, but somewhere in this surreal cultural collision something genuinely meaningful happened.   

In cinemas worldwide on Jul 28. On BBC Two and BBC iPlayer in the UK later this year.