“You’re watching a lot of this film through your fingers”: We speak to director Mike Christie about bringing Wham!’s groundbreaking 1985 China trip back to life in a captivating new film

Wham in China.

In April 1985, Wham! became the first western pop act to perform in China, winning over a people for whom the type of exuberant technicolor pop then dominating Western popular culture was entirely alien.

The ostensible objective for George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley's journey centred around two live dates at Beijing and Guangzhou (as part of their globe-trotting Big Tour). Interestingly though, the whole venture was actually a feat of promotional engineering.