Wham! 10 Days in China finally hands us the footage the world was almost never allowed to see. Forty-one years after George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley became the first Western pop group to perform in communist China, a newly restored documentary has landed in cinemas, and for anyone who grew up loving George Michael it plays like a time capsule cracked open at last.
This is not a greatest-hits reel. It is ten days in the spring of 1985, rescued from more than a hundred rusting film cans, and it arrives carrying the weight of everything we have since learned about the man at its centre.
The film that almost never existed
When Wham! flew east in April 1985, they travelled with a film crew. The band’s manager, Simon Napier-Bell, had hired the acclaimed British New Wave director Lindsay Anderson to capture the adventure. On paper it was a perfect match. It was not.
Anderson’s cut, titled If You Were There…, reportedly cost around 1.5 million dollars and dwelt on daily life in Communist-ruled China far more than on the two pop stars who had paid for it. Michael and Napier-Bell were dismayed by the lack of concert footage, and Anderson was let go. George Michael and director Andy Morahan salvaged the material into a shorter film, Wham! in China: Foreign Skies, which premiered at the band’s farewell concert on 28 June 1986. That shorter film was itself rarely seen again, shown to devoted fans but never given a proper release. Then most of the reels went dark, or so everyone assumed.
One hundred film cans, four decades later
Director Mike Christie began the rescue in September 2024. His team recovered more than 100 film cans holding over 20 hours of 16mm rushes, then spent seven months simply syncing picture to sound. Christie also recorded 60 to 70 hours of fresh interviews across the United States, the United Kingdom and China. He is adamant that Wham! 10 Days in China draws only on unseen material, with not a single clip borrowed from the two earlier documentaries. Almost everything on screen has been hidden for 41 years. Rebuilding a coherent story from that chaos, and from interviews recorded across three continents, is a feat in its own right.
Ten days that were never really about China
On paper, the trip was cultural diplomacy, a friendly first handshake between Western pop and a country only beginning to open up. In practice it was one of the shrewdest publicity stunts in music history, and Wham! 10 Days in China lets us watch the machinery turn.
Beijing and Canton, April 1985
Wham! played the Workers’ Gymnasium in Beijing on 7 April 1985, then the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou, then known as Canton, on 10 April. For audiences raised on state-approved entertainment, two feather-haired British boys bouncing through Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go were almost impossible to place. Some spectators sat in bewildered silence; others were reportedly discouraged by officials from dancing in their seats. That culture clash is the documentary’s comic heart, and Christie lets it breathe. It helps that 1985 was a hinge moment, a China cautiously opening to the outside world, which makes the duo’s neon pop look even more surreal on screen.
The real prize was America
Beijing made the headlines, but Los Angeles was the target. Being the first Western group to crack China generated exactly the kind of global press that Michael and Napier-Bell believed could finally break Wham! in the United States, the one major market that had so far resisted them. Wham! 10 Days in China captures that calculation as it happens, a very young duo turning a geopolitical first into a marketing legend and mostly getting away with it. It is a reminder that behind the bouffant haircuts and the sunny choruses sat two young men, and one canny manager, with a very sharp plan.
Why George Michael still belongs to us
For a gay magazine, this is far more than pop nostalgia.
Seeing him young, before everything
In 1985 George Michael was 21, closeted, and standing on the lip of global fame. He would not come out publicly until 1998, when an arrest in a Los Angeles restroom forced the conversation and he told CNN, with startling composure, that he was gay and at peace with it. He died on 25 December 2016 at the age of 53. To sit with Wham! 10 Days in China today is to watch a queer icon in the years before the wider world understood that part of him, radiant, quick-witted and utterly unguarded in front of a camera he had no reason to fear.
The first unabashed gay pop star
Michael would later be described as the first modern gay pop star totally unabashed about his sexuality, a mainstream idol with an enormous female following who never let that fanbase edit who he was. He is remembered today as much for his AIDS activism and his quiet, unpublicised generosity as for that voice. That is precisely why this footage matters. Wham! 10 Days in China needs no confession and no coming-out speech; it simply gives us more time with a man our community lost far too early, at the exact moment his ambition and his charm were burning at their brightest.
How and where to watch Wham! 10 Days in China
The 90-minute film, directed by Mike Christie and distributed by Trafalgar Releasing for Sony Music Vision, had a rare one-day worldwide cinema release on 28 July 2026, screening on roughly 1,000 screens across the US, the UK and Australia before moving to the BBC. The reviews have been affectionate: Wham! 10 Days in China opened on a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from its first critics and a generally favourable 76 on Metacritic, with The Times calling it quite brilliant and the best of the recent Wham! films. Time Out praised its exuberance, while the Irish Independent handed it four stars for the way Christie wrangles so many madcap incidents into shape.
Whether you queued for tickets in 1985 or found him long afterwards, Wham! 10 Days in China is a rare and joyful chance to watch George Michael begin, and perhaps to miss him a little more.
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