Author: Paul Sinclair

Wham!’s April 1985 trip to China is one of the more interesting episodes in the band’s relatively short lifespan. On the face of it, this was a cultural exchange: an East meets West excursion in search of understanding and common ground, but the reality was a little less romantic. The visit was conceived by Wham’s co-manager Simon Napier Bell as one gigantic publicity stunt designed to generate headlines and front-pages around the world – a short-cut to Wham! ‘Making It Big’, particularly in America. And it worked.

For reasons still unclear to this day, the services of Oscar-winning filmmaker Lindsey Anderson were secured to make a documentary film of the trip. Anderson is best known for his counter-culture classic If…. (1968), part one of an acclaimed ‘Mick Travis Trilogy’ (1973’s O Lucky Man!, and Britannia Hospital from 1982 being the other two films). Producer Martin Lewis appears to have been a fan and Anderson’s documentary work from the 1950s (he won his Oscar for Thursday’s Children, a film concerning the education of deaf children) would likely have been a factor in the decision.

This commission was beset with issues. As became apparent, Anderson had no real interest in Wham! and George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley disliked him. That he hurt his foot early in the trip didn’t help; for a while the director had to be pushed around in a wheelchair (he later managed to walk with a cane) and in posthumously published diary entries Anderson admitted he simply took the job for the money.

Nevertheless, Lindsay did pull together an almost finished documentary, which he called ‘If You Were There’. It ran for one hour and 18 minutes and I’m lucky enough to have seen this cut. It covers most of the key aspects of the trip (arriving at the airport, checking in at the hotel, visiting the Great Wall Of China, lunch at the Ambassador’s residence, out and about mixing with locals, the two gigs, etc.) but, as George and Andew perhaps should have expected, Anderson is very interested in China and there’s a lot of it in his cut. He occasionally uses his film to make some socio-economic points (footage of Wham! performing ‘Everything She Wants’ is given the subtitle ‘To Give You Money’ and is intercut with shots of TVs and large ghetto blasters being available in shops in China) and British Wham! fans looking forward to watching their idols play in China probably didn’t want to see shots of dogs hanging up waiting to be butchered and snakes being skinned alive.

I actually liked Anderson’s cut and with some small adjustments it could have been a compelling documentary, but the reality was that is not what Wham! were after. They wanted something approaching an extended promo video with ‘China’ as window dressing. Anderson was fired from the project during post-production and George and the band’s management team, took control of the edit and, using the footage that had been shot, they fashioned exactly that: Wham! in China: Foreign Skies was a rather bland 60-minute cut where the viewer is left to work out what is happening (Anderson’s cut at least has a structure and title cards) and removes anything is likely to paint Wham! in a negative light (for example, no George and Andrew in the back of a car joshing about how the only reason there are there was for “the publicity”). Foreign Skies was previewed over a year later at Wham!’s The Final show at Wembley Stadium, and issued on VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc in October 1986. After that, it was rarely spoken of and never reissued.

Cut to 2026, and over 40 years later, filmmaker Mike Christie (Hansa Studios: By the Wall 1976–90, New Order: Decades and Suede: The Insatiable Ones) announces that he has made what will be officially the third version of the Wham! in China film. Wham! 10 Days in China takes a retrospective look at the trip using restored and never-before-seen archive footage, combined with interviews with those who experienced the tour firsthand, including Andrew Ridgeley, Pepsi and Shirley, some of the producers/assistants, members of the press and most notably some Chinese fans for whom the experience left an indelible mark.

Next week, Mike’s film will hit cinemas and will be broadcast on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer in the UK in August. I recently spoke to Mike about his film – enjoy this long read:

SDE: How did Wham! 10 Days in China come about? Was it something that you sought out?

Mike Christie: It’s one of those mythological kinds of projects; everybody knew that this trip had been filmed and that the rushes [raw, unedited visual and audio footage recorded during shooting] had been pretty much buried. It goes back to January 2023 for us: Fred, the development producer I was working with at that point, he mentioned it. It became slightly more relevant coming up to the 40th anniversary. I think after the 40th anniversary, you can’t really be sure there’ll be many people left to tell the story, so we got in touch to explore it. What made a difference was the fact that I had already made multiple documentaries in China [including The Art of China with Andrew Graham-Dixon 2014] and the notion of there being multiple perspectives, including the Chinese perspective. That caught Andrew [Ridgeley]’s interest because, as you know from the previous two films, that hadn’t been portrayed. So, we went through the process. Ultimately, the GM Estate and George’s sister, Yioda, had to sign up for it. And everybody was aware of the different sensitivities of the history of the project.

There was no real way of truly understanding the trip when they were there

Mike Christie

SDE: I’m interested in those sensitivities, because arguably George and Andrew don’t necessarily come across too positively in the film. They wander around slightly bemused, bewildered and on occasions frustrated. They openly admit that they’re just there for publicity and Andrew even says it to someone [in a scene at the British Ambassador’s residence] that “we’re not really here for their [meaning the Chinese fans’] reaction”.

MC: I think that’s a line that’s consistent all the way through, certainly through my film. What was intriguing was that from the moment he saw the first cut, I always wondered whether Andrew might censor himself. But he was like, “no, that’s the honest version”. And he never cut anything. Which surprised me.

SDE: I’m wondering if one of the reasons Andrew was interested in coming back to Wham! in China was because of a sense of guilt around the fact that it was pure commercial opportunism and maybe they didn’t think about the Chinese people and the Chinese aspect as much as they should have?

MC: Andrew was open in our interviews about the fact that he really wasn’t sure the trip was a good idea, but I don’t know if it was guilt. I think there was definitely a curiosity. Andrew felt a really strong urge to revisit it, that was clear, and I think that’s partly why the Chinese perspective worked within the mix for him. But I think it might have been that there was no real way of truly understanding the trip when they were there. And that’s reflected in the first two films [If You Were There and Foreign Skies] which make no effort to understand it.

SDE: They’re both extremely young at the time. It’s a bit like your parents making you go on a holiday somewhere that you’re not interested in. There’s that “Why are we here, exactly?” vibe going on.

MC: And they cope extraordinarily. I mean, Andrew’s 22 years old, George is 21. I found it really staggering, when you’re looking through these rushes, watching their relationship – it’s very solid. Andrew has got a clear set of values, which I think he holds to this day. George has a very clear sense of himself, the band and his own values as well. It’s kind of refreshing how honest they were in all that footage; they’re not pretending and when they must put a ‘PR smile’ on, they’re admitting to it.

SDE: They are polite, friendly with the locals and patient when having to go through the rigmarole of meeting the dignitaries and all that kind of stuff.

MC: And there is so much more of that. I’ve lost track of the number of banquets that we had rushes for. It took us a while to settle on the title for this film but the fact that having been on tour, I’m used to itineraries and I thought “it feels like an itinerary”. You can imagine what the actual itinerary was like: there was probably five things a day!

SDE: With Foreign Skies, the original cut, did you have to go back and re-educate youIrself about what that film was? Obviously, it’s not widely available, although it can be found on YouTube.

MC: For a long time during the development period, we only had Foreign Skies. Fred, the development producer had done this pilgrimage to Stirling University [the only place it is possible to view Lindsey Anderson’s original version] which is a long way – it was quite a rigmarole. But Andrew always had a copy of that, so eventually just before we started, he was able to share it. Obviously, I watched them, more than once but I made a point of very rarely revisiting them once we got into pre-production, because you don’t want to be influenced. There was a lot about Lindsay’s edit – I don’t think it’s cut, but the edit – that kind of appealed and there’s some things that I just thought were weird. I mean, it’s pretty obvious he was completely the wrong choice to make the film. And I think the big telling thing is the bit of interview we used of Lindsay at the end where he gets asked by one of the crew, something along the lines of “what is it you’re doing”. And he kind of goes, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself that for a couple of weeks”. He admitted he was only doing it for the money before he went and towards the very final days, he didn’t really know why he was there. So, it was kind of doomed to fail. It was always a complete mismatch.

It’s pretty obvious that Lindsay Anderson was completely the wrong choice to make the original film.

Mike Christie

Anyway, I watched them and for quite a long time, we weren’t sure what was going to be in these film cans [the rushes]. So, we were tracking down high-quality versions of these two cuts, because we thought that we would have to use them – we’d be cutting some of the scenes [from the previous finished films]. But it took seven months, for all the transfers and for an incredible restoration process and as it worked out, we were probably halfway through the edit before we realised we were never going to need to use clips from either of the pre-existing films, because there was stuff coming in constantly. We realised that we really could focus on the story of those ten days. I thought we’d do more preamble, we thought we’d do more aftermath, but we covered that off in the interviews. So, there was no need for me to revisit the films too much. But I’m like this when I’m making a film about anything. I try not to get too influenced by stuff, especially since this is a unique film. I mean, I was quite worried. I wondered if I was putting myself in a kind of poisoned chalice situation. It was quite stressful.

SDE: As a fellow filmmaker, do you have much sympathy for what happened with Lindsay Anderson?

MC: I’ve got mixed feelings. Ultimately, I think there’s no doubt about his talents; his abilities. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, given his pedigree.

SDE: He won an Oscar…

MC: Exactly. And more than one of those movies are good. Do I have sympathy? It’s sort of it’s a weird one. I don’t think he should have taken the project, but he clearly needed to. I think he made a mistake and I don’t think he could recover from it. I don’t think he had the ability to make something in the modern world of the 1980s, and I think he let himself down – but I think he knew that. I think when you look at the three films as a triptych, if you like, the only one that actually tells a story is the new film.

SDE: With your film, there’s a few different layers to it. You’re telling a story that’s already been told, but then you’re also stepping back and from high up looking down on what happened. What are the challenges in terms of that approach, compared to making a normal documentary where you’re just going at it fresh, without the baggage of other stuff that exists?

MC: It depends how you want to view it. For me, it’s like a crime scene: 40 years ago, they went to China and bagged the evidence. But then no one ever analysed it. So, the challenges are innumerable on a narrative, technical and personal levels. I had to think long and hard about style for the film. I don’t know if you, how much you’ve observed the style of the ten days film, but…

It’s like a crime scene: 40 years ago, Wham! went to China and bagged the evidence, but then no one ever analysed it.

Mike Christie

SDE: I was going to ask you about that. You’ve obviously got the talking head cutaways for the interviews. There’s a trend these days to maybe not do that so much. An example being the Paul McCartney film, Man on the Run, which I think is all done with voiceover…

MC: Also like the Senna film [Asif Kapadia’s acclaimed 2010 Ayrton Senna documentary]. The Wham! film [Chris Smith’s 2023 Netflix documentary] was the same thing, it was voices only and an archive. We talked about it; it would have been entirely doable, but we made a conscious decision at the beginning, not to. I think it’s interesting to see people’s faces. I think you do get something [extra]. It’s the difference between a phone call and a meeting in person, right? Your body language tells you quite a lot and you lose that for a start.

I don’t know if you noticed, but one of the things we worked really hard on, and it was really hard to do, was not to have a ‘then and now’ feeling where the archive exists in this odd bubble and then you cut to an interview shot in somebody’s beautiful apartment in Paris or a five-star hotel. The most recent example of this is the Kylie documentary. Our idea was to bring it into a single, timeless space where the archive footage doesn’t jar – it doesn’t feel like it’s being viewed through a window. So, there’s a lot of stylistic stuff going on that’s quite subtle, but most of the interview settings were meant to feel like it could be in China.

SDE: The traditional understanding of what a film director does is they stand around and tell the camera operator where and what to film, whereas with the film you’ve made that role changes a bit… or does it?

MC: I spent a lot of time at the beginning of this process asking, “what’s my job? Am I finishing Lindsay’s film? What am I doing?”. The role does change to a certain extent. Initially, after wondering if I was finishing Lindsey’s film, I saw his cut and I thought it wasn’t a cut. This was a rough cut or an assembly [the very first version where all the footage is compiled together]. He was nowhere near, and I don’t think he ever would have got there because he didn’t have the narrative. So, I stopped feeling I was finishing his film when I realised he hadn’t directed the footage – he sat in background. When we talked to the camera operator and the documentary team, they said they weren’t getting any direction. When you asked earlier about whether I felt sympathy towards Lindsey, I think this project doesn’t denigrate Lindsey’s reputation and ability, but ultimately, I think he failed the project. But he did us all a favour; he captured this thing. So, fundamentally you’re working with footage. And as I’ve already said, I tried to ignore the previous cuts – we’re just working with the rushes and we’re not cutting from those films. There’s very, very few shots that you’ll find in ‘10 Days’ that’s there in the other two films, because that material had physically been cut from the reels – it wasn’t in the reels, so we’d have to go back to the masters to bring it back in. And we only did that with some of the concert shots.

Your job is to make the audience feel and understand what happened.

Mike Christie

But getting back to your specific question about my role… before we started filming, we’d spent the best part of a year-and-a-half thinking about it and then Alice, the producer, came in. When I make films I draw badly – I draw these shapes, mind maps, layers and curves and one of the things I drew early on was the emotional curve of this film. I knew how it was going to feel. Your job is to basically take all the perspectives and all the complexity and all the raw material and capture the essence of it and all the different layers. And I think that was the goal. That’s your job. Your job is to make the audience feel and understand what happened.

SDE: I think most people of a certain age remember when we Wham! went to China, but they may be shocked to realise that they only played two gigs there.

MC: And two gigs in Hong Kong [beforehand]

SDE: Those were never filmed or captured then?

MC: No. And they felt like British gigs because it was a British colony. They did that because of the proximity to China – and for the money, because it cost a lot of money. I mean, the whole caboodle cost, allegedly, a million quid. They certainly spent a lot of money on the documentary shoot because they had six film cameras. And thank God for that, because when you look at the stuff at the end of my film, when you see a bit of America [a peak forward at the Whamamerica! tour later in 1985], you’re looking at video footage. My understanding is The Final gig was only shot on video, too. It doesn’t hold up. Thank God they took film cameras [to China].

SDE: Simon Napier-Bell says a few times in your film that the only purpose for the trip was to break America in a big way. But the reality is, by the time they got to China, Wham! had enjoyed three number one singles in the US from the Make It Big album (‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, ‘Everything She Wants’ and ‘Careless Whisper’) and the album itself had gone to number one. I mean, how much bigger do you want to be in America?

MC: Yeah, I think I asked a similar question early on. I started working in the music industry in 1988, but I’m not an expert on the mid-80s American music market. My understanding is that wasn’t enough to do stadiums. That would get you onto the thirty-date theatre tours that they were trying to avoid so I think they were trying to leapfrog a whole stage.

SDE: How difficult was it tracking down some of those key Chinese audience members that you interview in the film?

MC: It varied. Simon [Napier-Bell] was a consultant on the project, for lots of different reasons, but he still had quite good contacts in China. And still he was able to do interviews in China, which meant that he could plug the fact that the documentary was in production and we’d get people contacting us. It took a lot of time and a lot of effort and we had a producer in China who was working hard. I think we had a shortlist of about 10 or 12 people. But you know, there were 130 people in the tour party. There were a lot of people who fed into the research, but we couldn’t interview everyone. Some people don’t say anywhere near as much as I’d like them to, but the Chinese contingent took a long time and it was the last thing we filmed, as well. We were shooting over a six-month period, and the last bit was China and we nearly didn’t get in; it was touch and go.

SDE: Was the Chinese perspective the thing that made Andrew, in particular, interested in cooperating?

MC: I don’t think he’d say it was the only reason, but I think it was a strong reason. And I think it was the point of difference because no one else had explored that. I’ve been to China; I understood the culture, I understood the history. But the thing is, we say this now, but we genuinely didn’t know the impact, until we found those [Chinese] contributors and we’d done the research and then we understood their stories.

That trip transformed so many people’s lives, but going back there transformed Andrew’s understanding of it.

Mike Christie

SDE: What is your film about, ultimately?

MC: I think all directors need some sort of device to unlock a film. Lindsay didn’t find his, Foreign Skies, as we’ve discussed is what they wanted it to be, but what I found is that the films that work best are the ones that are clear about what’s unlocking the narrative. And, this new film, for me, is about two things: pressure and perspectives. I think the Chinese perspective unlocks all the other perspectives because it’s the counterpoint. The pressure is obvious all the way through. But Andrew’s perspective shift at the end, is so dramatic. It’s really moving and beautiful. That trip transformed so many people’s lives, but going back there transformed Andrew’s understanding of it.

SDE: The scene with George enjoying a massage is revealing, in a number of ways…

MC: We had a long discussion about the massage. There are two things that gave us permission to include it. A: George actually says, “I’ve got no issue with you filming my buttocks” during the scene. And B: The fact that it’s in Foreign Skies, even though it’s much shorter, at just 20 or 30 seconds, it’s still in there.

SDE: I was surprised that he was he was willing to let that shot be in Foreign Skies, but in your film…

MC: … there’s a lot more buttocks!

SDE: Yes, but you get that nice interaction with the member of the crew he’s talking to; his guard is completely down.

MC: During that scene, he says something along the lines of “they kind of wanted us here, but now they want to forget we’re here”. It’s actually very hard to find George talking about China.

SDE: Which is one of the other problems you were faced with. A bit like when Apple did The Beatles Anthology when John Lennon wasn’t around. A person’s view of something five years after it happens may be different to their view 40 years later. Andrew has got his view today, George has got whatever views he had, whenever they were recorded. He is no longer with us, so that must have been a challenge.

MC: We were never sure whether we’d find a lot [of archive commentary about China] or not a lot. Some recorded views were a year or so later, but I think there was a lot of politeness. But we did manage to find enough of George talking about it to make him present. We found some other interviews in strange places. Some of it’s from TV shows and one of them was interview from the Library of Congress in America. You can download the whole interview. It was the same with Lindsay… the same problem, finding his voice. One of the things that really upset me is the one person who was massively absent is [Wham! co-manager] Jazz Summers [who died in 2015] which I think is a huge shame. It’s something we did try to address, but ultimately, there were no real usable interviews. There were interviews he did for his book, but they weren’t usable for different reasons.

SDE: Having spoken to Andrew and gone through all the George Michael archive interviews, do you think there’s a difference in their opinions of that trip or are they very much aligned?

MC: I think everyone’s quite consistent, actually. As a documentary filmmaker, I am very suspicious of biopics, because I don’t trust testimony and memory; I think we’re all quite poor witnesses. There’s a film I made about Hansa Studios and the one thing that was really reassuring about that was the fact that people who hadn’t seen each other for decades were telling the same story. And one of the great things about this Wham film, particularly when we did the difficult scene about Raul [D’Oliveria, Portuguese trumpet player with the band, who stabbed himself in the stomach on an aeroplane during the trip], was that even though these people had not talked for years, but there were all consistently remembering things, such as the speed at which the plane descended. So, it’s possible to cut everyone’s interviews together and there’ll be a continuity because their memories aren’t dissimilar. I’ve found it comes at a certain place in people’s lives. People have a really clear memory of their twenties, on the whole. When I was talking to Martin Gore for the Hansa film, he had a clear memory of that period, and I think a lot of that is because he was like 23, 24, or 25 – it’s a really formative period.

I think what’s interesting is we thought that George was more negative about the whole trip [than he actually was]. We felt at the outset George had a bit of a downer on the footage, the trip, the film, the whole experience, but we never found anything that really mirrored that. He says at the beginning that it was “really difficult” but we found very little evidence of him having a very negative view of it. Because he’s no longer with us, what you don’t get is the thing you get with Andrew at the end; the whole coming to terms with it and having a bit of a more positive spin on it, which is a shame.

SDE: Simon Napier-Bell is surprisingly unapologetic and bullish in your documentary about the goals of the trip. He doesn’t really reflect much and, for example, suggest “maybe we should have made more effort to do this, that or the other”. He’s just like “The whole thing was about publicity. We did it brilliantly. The end.”

MC: [laughs] I like Simon a great deal. I think he’s an incredible man. But the thing is – and this goes back to my distrust of memory – is that sometimes people don’t remember what happened, they remember the last time they told the story, and I think Simon had actually got so used to telling ‘his version’ of the story that we had to challenge him. I mean, there’s some interviewees we couldn’t use in the film because they were unreliable witnesses. Their story didn’t fit with anyone else’s. But it was very interesting, because we filmed his interview over two days – it was the second longest interview after Andrew’s – and overnight, he came back the next day and told us he went through his notes and he checked this, he checked that and he worked out where his anecdotal version had slightly diverged from reality and he corrected it.

In answer to your question, he might seem very matter of fact – and I think that’s that is how he is – but I would say a lot of the interview was a lot more thoughtful. We couldn’t always find the place for some of those sections, but he’s an interesting character.

SDE: One of the memorable scenes in your film is the press conference. That’s not in any of the other films. That sequence sums up the band’s uneasy relationship with the press, particularly with Andrew where he seems to have feelings of pure hatred. The film also reminds us of the power of the press back then; printed media, the tabloids. The amount of press following them around was incredible, but that was the deal with the devil, wasn’t it?

MC: The Faustian pact, yeah, exactly. Whether they were expecting that amount of press corps following the round, I don’t know.

SDE: The rushes that you found, had they been ‘lost’, as people always say when they find tapes, or were they just stored somewhere and no one had bothered to look at them?

MC: They weren’t lost, they were in storage, but there was a degree of that ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ warehouse, in terms of ‘what are we going to find’? No one had opened the cans, and we genuinely didn’t know what we were going to find. The biggest difficulty was [the fact that] it’s film. So, anything that went into the [two previous] films was cut out of these reels and the sound is separate. So, you’ve got this ridiculous workflow, which takes an hour for every minute of footage where they’re literally sticking bits of film back together; fixing the physical issues with it, scanning it digitally, and then taking the sound and syncing everything up manually. The workflow is extraordinary.

SDE: Do you think they’ll ever release just the concert, in full?

MC: The problem is that the cameras weren’t directed, they’re just filming. That’s a problem because sometimes you’ve got six cameras and they’re all on different shots. And sometimes there’s three cameras running because the other are changing their mags and they’re all framed on the same shot, but at a slightly different angle. There’s a couple of songs where there’s only one camera running!  So, you know, you’ve got a problem…

SDE: They could do the audio of it though. That would be quite good. I noticed Chris Porter recorded it all.

MC: So yeah, Chris Porter remixed these. We remixed from the 24-track multis, so the audio was properly restored and there are 5.1 mixes.

SDE: Presumably, they’ve just done what is needed for your film? He hasn’t gone off and done the whole thing?

MC: No comment [laughs].

SDE: Does this now feel like your film? You’ve got to the end of the process; you’ve stamped your personality as a filmmaker on it. It’s very much your film now, isn’t it?

MC: I’ll take you back to a key word here, which is perspectives. So ultimately, I would say, what’s the audience perspective? I think the audience perspective is that the only film that tells them what happened and shows them what happened, is 10 Days in China. I think a mainstream audience wouldn’t get through the other two films, although fans would. I think there’s a place for each of the films, but I think the best films feel like time machines; they transport you to a time and a place, and then they really convey what happened there and what it felt like. And if that’s the goal, I think it has achieving that. We won’t know until the audience see it, but certainly the limited audiences that have seen it so far find it absolutely fascinating on those different levels.

SDE: Who is the audience for this film and did you have any pressure or guidance to perhaps make it appeal to a younger demographic? Or do you think the audience is primarily people of a certain age that enjoyed that era?

MC: I think there’s more than one question there. I think if the first question is ‘what audience did we make the film for?’ The second question is ‘what audience will the film find?’ The audience we made the film for, we felt was, obviously Wham! fans, but also cinephiles; although one of the complications with that is how little we have of Lindsay Anderson in the film, because he was so absent due to what I would call a dereliction of duty. So, you’ve got Wham! fans, cinephiles to some extent – since it’s an interesting document – but then I think it’s also an historical and cultural document, the China stuff really pulls people in. And at the end of the day, even people who don’t know anything about George Michael or Wham! will recognize ‘Careless Whisper’ or ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’. So, I think there are multiple audiences. It’s also worth acknowledging something Andrew said, which is that this is the only film footage of Wham! in a dressing room; sound checking; jamming. That’s incredible.

SDE: Let’s just talk briefly about the final scene, a slightly cringeworthy scene where Lindsay gets ignored by George backstage after the final gig. I presume you chose to put that in to kind of make a point?

MC: Yeah, because that final scene, if you look carefully, reveals everything. There’s [producer] Martin Lewis stood in the background with Lindsay in the foreground; There’s that moment where Simon Napier-Bell comes in and does one of his kind of eyebrow arches and walks away; and George ignoring Lindsay. Initially, we had that shot unedited and it was too long. There was another 20 seconds of Lindsay with his hand on George’s shoulder and George just ignoring him. That speaks volumes.

SDE: It’s good to see Lindsay in it because when they did the showing of his version at the BFI they promoted it with a still photograph, which I think it was at the Ambassador’s residence, in the back garden. It’s the only time I’d ever seen a photo of them together, so it’s nice to see him, in your film.

 MC: Like I said, you don’t want in any way to undermine the guy’s canon of work, which obviously is extraordinary, in its own right. But ultimately, I think if you could talk to him now, he’d probably say he just regretted getting involved with this project.

Thanks to Mike Christie who was talking to Paul Sinclair for SDE. Wham! 10 Days in China is in Cinemas from 28 July 2026 and will be shown on BBC TV in the UK in late August.