Andrew Ridgeley says WHAM! China film reveals hidden legacy
andrew ridgeley says WHAM! 10 Days in China finally reveals the unknown legacy of the duo’s 1985 China venture. Two and Music are giving the 90-minute documentary its world exclusive terrestrial TV broadcast this summer, bringing a rare tour back into view for a UK audience.
In 1985, Wham! became the first Western pop group to perform in communist China. George Michael and Ridgeley played two concerts, in Beijing and Guangzhou, and the film returns to that visit through newly digitised and never-before-seen archive footage.
Beijing and Guangzhou 1985
The documentary is built around a tour that introduced live Western pop to Chinese audiences and made global headlines in its own time. That history gives the broadcast a different weight from a standard music retrospective: it is not just a band story, but a record of a specific opening between British pop and a country in transition.
Ridgeley’s own line captures the scale of the project. “This film finally reveals the unknown legacy of WHAM!’s groundbreaking venture, and lays bare, in all their human contradictions, the individual perspectives behind what was a bold and risky, high stakes gamble.” The wording is blunt about the stakes, and the film appears to lean into that uncertainty rather than sanding it down into nostalgia.
Jonathan Rothery and Two
Jonathan Rothery, who commissioned the film for the, linked the new broadcast to the response to WHAM! Last Christmas Unwrapped in 2024. He said, “Following the huge wave of affection from viewers that greeted WHAM! Last Christmas Unwrapped, I’m thrilled that we are able to tell the story of another of WHAM!’s legacy milestones.”
He also said, “George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s momentous visit to China over forty years ago made global headlines, and now our viewers will be able to watch their spellbinding performances and see behind the scenes of their momentous visit for the first time on UK television.” That gives the new film a clear purpose: it is not a recap, but the first terrestrial TV look at material that had stayed out of reach.
Supercollider’s 90 minutes
WHAM! 10 Days in China is produced by Supercollider and directed by Mike Christie, with Sony Music Vision, Sony Music Entertainment UK and Supercollider all attached to the project. The film also includes interviews with people who experienced the tour firsthand, which should help move it beyond archive compilation and into something closer to a reconstruction of how the trip looked from the inside.
The smart move here is the same one the made with the 2024 film: treat the band’s China visit as a piece of cultural history worth programming on its own terms. For viewers, the value is in the footage that has not been seen before, and in hearing Ridgeley frame the tour as a gamble rather than a victory lap.
