BTS: WHAM! 10 Days in China

This week sees the BBC broadcast feature documentary WHAM! 10 Days in China, a 90-minute documentary film from Sony Music Vision, in association with Sony Music Entertainment UK, and Supercollider (a Zinc Media Company).

In 1985, WHAM! were the first Western pop group to perform in communist China. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s two concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou introduced live Western pop to Chinese audiences and marked a turning point for the band. The tour captured American attention and launch them into global superstardom.

Drawing on restored, newly digitised and never-before-seen archive footage, alongside interviews with those who experienced the tour firsthand, the film revisits this historic moment through the eyes of the band, their team and Chinese audiences encountering Western pop culture for the first time.

Here, the documentary’s director Mike Christie describes the behind the scenes journey of the film.

When we set out to make this film, we knew we had an extraordinary trip to document: an iconic pop group entering an unknown land. We also had two early versions of a film that had attempted, unsuccessfully, to chronicle that historic trip. What we didn’t know was that the unseen rushes would open up a much deeper, more complex set of possibilities.

The rushes were never lost. They were just ignored, in a guarded storage unit. Shot on Super 16, the generically marked cans had to be opened and transferred: seven months of painstaking work, revealing 20 hours of unseen material from China, captured over ten days in 1985.

As we began to look at it in the edit, gently piece it together and reduce it, we discovered unexpected layers. The mission was to stay truthful to what we were uncovering, and there was a shock in the intimacy of the footage. Decades before reality TV, it was frequently unguarded. George and Andrew knew the cameras were there, but these were two boys who had found enormous success and fame as teenagers, and had learned to protect themselves from the media.

When they were together, they would occasionally let their guard down and allow the nature and depth of their bond to show. They were never afraid to be truthful with each other, often while the cameras were running. Their reactions to camera are sometimes almost conspiratorial: George flicks his eyes, bats his eyelids; Andrew rolls his eyes, smirks, frowns. Their irritation with the entourage of press and documentary crew was not discreet.

Unusually for film, the cameras rarely cut, so the footage felt like CCTV just rolling, passively capturing. That discovery shaped the whole approach. It was not simply an exercise in recovering the past, but in conjuring 1985 emotionally and atmospherically on screen.

The edit allowed the truth to emerge, but we were careful never to overimpose an agenda. We could observe behaviour, without pretending to know exactly what George or Andrew was feeling.

That was why the testimony mattered. The story emerging from the footage could be tested against the accounts of people who had been there as press, crew, band, documentary team and family. There were no outside pundits, no cultural commentators. Every perspective was first-hand: set in people’s memories and recorded on film for all to see.

We didn’t initially plan to contain the entire film within a ten-day frame. The strength of the narrative, and the value of the material as it arrived, persuaded me to limit the build-up and aftermath. But we needed to do justice to what really happened in China.

To preserve the sense of this unfolding for the viewer, and to minimise the jolt of contemporary interviews, locations weren’t chosen – they were cast. Because the 1985 rushes were handheld, roving, curious, I wanted the same style in the sit-down interviews: a camera that would leave and arrive, allowing the edit to flow between past and present, and create a filmic place and time somewhere in between.

The finished film is all about perspectives, and the Chinese perspective had never been properly considered, the impact never truly documented or understood, and it provided an even richer layer of emotion and revelation than anyone expected.

It also changed the meaning of some of the footage. The moments when George or Andrew cannot fully decode their experiences – like the mute and still audience reaction to the first concert – were unlocked by the Chinese contributors, whose testimony transformed our understanding of what we thought we were seeing.

The band witnessed the oddities of the press and documentary agendas, and knew George and Andrew well enough to interpret much of what was playing out before their eyes. They were close enough to understand the friendship, but far enough from the centre of the pressure to read the discomfort clearly. These boys were just 21 and 22 during those ten days in China. It is easy to forget how young that really is.

It is incredibly moving. Loads of kids try to form a band with their best mates. Andrew Ridgeley was lucky. He started a childhood band with one of the world’s greatest songwriters and performers, but more importantly to him, he started a band with his best friend. Watching that friendship survive the test of China is unique.

The film doesn’t glaze over the uncomfortable moments where Andrew, by his own admission, behaves a little unreasonably. It doesn’t hide George’s discomfort: his withdrawal from a record shop when he doesn’t know how to cope with a relatively innocent shake of the head from a young Chinese boy who says they will not be dancing at the concert.

And it doesn’t fear lingering on George as he wanders through the Forbidden City. We cannot know exactly what he was thinking, and the film is careful not to project the reality of his future. But the archive allows us to sit with those moments: a young man beginning to measure the distance between the life he was living and the life he might still have to cope with.

That is why the film felt so naturally suited to cinema. The archive was not simply there to be examined; it was there to be experienced. Communally, with the band at full force and the faces large enough to read. The performances release something the interviews and history can only circle around: the joy of music, the emotional charge of memory, and the sight of George and Andrew briefly alive again inside the same rush of sound, friendship, youth and possibility.