Wham’s China Film Lost Lindsay Anderson After Six Months

On 3 April 1985, Lindsay Anderson assembled a 30-person film crew in a Hong Kong hotel. They were flying to Beijing the next morning with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. Anderson called the two members of Wham! “apostles of the New Materialism”. This was plainly not going to be a cheerful tour diary.

Producer Martin Lewis had hired him for that reason. Wham!’s China trip could have supplied an MTV-shaped travelogue; Lewis wanted a festival documentary about a pop group entering a country on the edge of modernisation. Managers Jazz Summers and Simon Napier-Bell, however, never properly explained that plan to Michael or Ridgeley.

Six months later, the musicians watched Anderson’s 80-minute work-in-progress, If You Were There…. They expected a light account of the trip and found an authored documentary. By then Michael was preparing to leave Wham!, while management wanted one last product that could be sold quickly. The multi-million-selling home video about the making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller supplied a very legible business model.

Summers told Lewis to dismiss Anderson. Lewis refused and resigned; the director was fired by telephone minutes later. Other editors recut the footage into the hour-long Foreign Skies, screened at Wembley Stadium during Wham! The Final in 1986, between the live support acts.

The archive has now fed a new documentary, Wham! 10 Days in China. Anderson’s version remains essentially an un-film, rarely shown: a project intended to expand the image of a pop group, then trimmed into something easier to sell. Two films were fighting in the edit suite. More precisely, two ideas of what a music film is for.