I enjoyed the 'Wham! 10 Days in China' film if only for the footage of peak-Wham, especially George Michael's beautiful singing of Careless Whisper - who then or now can sing like that live? Seeing that second show in Guangzhou in April 1985 would be up there on my fantasy list of gigs I would have loved to have been at.
Still, it feels strange to have a film featuring George Michael in 2026 that doesn't wonder out loud what it must have been like for a closeted gay man to be in the middle of this media circus in 1985? Or what it was like for performers of colour like 'Trevor' (what was his full name?), who warmed up the Beijing crowd as a break dancer?
The overall narrative of China 'opening up to the West' seems somewhat anachronistic now. There's mention of the old world meeting the new world but which was which? What Andrew Ridgely correctly identifies as the colonial hangovers at the British embassy were not really the future were they? Ironically many in the Chinese audience now look cooler than the 1980s pop stars and their entourage.
And there's a total absence of historical context beyond the obvious 'first Western pop band to play in China'. For instance, the gigs in April 1985 took place in the month after the end of the bitter miners strike in Britain - not directly relevant perhaps even if Wham! had played a benefit gig for a strikers' hardship fund, but some acknowledgement that they weren't simply ambassadors of an unproblematic British affluence would have been appropriate. Not to mention the fact that four years later the Chinese state was gunning down protestors in the same Tiananmen Square that George and Michael wander across at the beginning of this film. Still if you feel the terrible injustice that Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou is no longer wandering across Hampstead Heath you will probably watch and have a bit of weep, like I did.
