Four decades after he and George Michael became the first western pop act to tour the country, Ridgeley recalls silent gigs, awkward embassy receptions – and the ‘bloody ludicrous’ hiring of Lindsay Anderson as director

There has always been something surreal about Wham!’s 1985 trip to China. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley looked like alien visitors on the streets of Beijing, their bouffant hair and flamboyant outfits setting them apart from the Mao jackets and drab uniforms of the Chinese people they encountered.

Now the full strangeness of the duo’s brief trip, which made them the first western pop act to play in the country, is explored in a fascinating documentary film, Wham! 10 Days in China. Using previously unseen archive footage and featuring new interviews with many of the people involved in the tour, it shows the extraordinary impact Wham!’s two concerts had on their Chinese audience, as well as providing a snapshot of a country on the brink of great change.

His mother was an Oscar-winning actor who had been exploited from a young age; Astin appeared in The Goonies at just 13. Now, he has followed in his mother’s footsteps again as a union leader. He talks Stranger Things, AI and why playing Samwise Gamgee cost him his house

Sean Astin is showing me around his new office. There’s framed movie prints on the walls, piles of paperwork and a stack of boxes of Stranger Things Funko Pops. “If you were here, you could look out this window and see a 10-storey building with our iconic Sag-Aftra logo on it,” he says proudly on video call, gesturing out of the window to the Los Angeles skyline. “But you just have to trust me that it’s there.” He shows me a framed photo of his mother, Patty Duke, aged 16, with the best supporting actress Oscar she won in 1963 (for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker), and even more proudly, a framed copy of Duke’s business card from when she was president of the Screen Actors Guild in the mid-80s – the role he now occupies (Sag merged with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 2012). The 10 months of his presidency “has been a whirlwind”, he says.

It’s still slightly jarring to see Astin in a suit and tie, lanyard around his neck. We’re more accustomed to seeing him in the handwoven cloak and hairy feet of Samwise Gamgee, loyally accompanying mister Frodo into Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. Or as Winona Ryder’s short-lived partner in Stranger Things (before a Demodog got to him). Or as never-say-die college football underdog “Rudy” Ruettiger in the 1993 biopic. Or, for viewers of his own vintage, as plucky leader Mikey in The Goonies. Astin has been a member of the union he now represents for 45 of his 55 years, but he seems to have survived the perils of child stardom and a Hollywood upbringing remarkably unscathed. In fact, you could see it all as preparation for the role.

It’s set in a UK racked by an unbearable heatwave and the rise of extremism – this adaptation of the 2010 novel feels horrifyingly apt

When The Rapture by Liz Jensen was first published, in 2010, it was set in a near-future when temperatures in the UK are rising to unbearable heights, culty-Christian groups with apocalyptic bents are springing up all over the place and there is a growing sense that the world is going mad. Swap out “culty-Christian” for “political extremists bent on embracing the apocalypse rather than trying to save us from it” and it would be a deluded soul indeed who wouldn’t place it among fiction’s more prescient offerings.

The adaptation that has arrived on our screens 16 years later – a study in physical and mental discomfort – is the perfect accompaniment to our current record-breaking, fear-inducing heatwave, and gains a lot of power from our growing collective awareness that the future is finally here.

Feathers are flying over the halal chicken chain Master Poulet opening a branch in gentrified Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine – it’s an issue of wealth and class we know only too well

How do you like your progressive politics? Are you net-zero left or anti-identity politics left? A “legalising drugs” kind of radical or someone whose public sector solidarity includes police? Nato or Nat-no? The reputation for infighting in lefty spaces – where policy disagreements harden into personal tests of morality – needs neither introduction nor encouragement.

But reading about the left-on-left battle at Master Poulet, a French chicken chain that just opened its first UK branch, I found myself mulling a question that felt more than a little personal: am I chicken shop left?

Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK

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The Game of Thrones actor on her feral youth, not playing the fame game, and being protective of her daughter

Born in Hamilton, Bermuda, in 1973 and raised in West Yorkshire and Somerset, Lena Headey is an actor, writer and director. She made her film debut in Waterland in 1992. Her career spans 300, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Game of Thrones, in which she played Cersei Lannister from 2011 to 2019, earning five Emmy nominations. Intimacy, which she writes, directs and stars in, is an eight-part comedy audio drama for BBC Sounds and Radio 4.

I was an OG onesie wearer. This was taken on Christmas Day in our house in Bermuda. My parents were in the police force, and for some reason one day the Yorkshire branch decided: “We’re all going to go to Bermuda for some training.” I don’t remember much from that time, but I know that it was hot, everyone had scooters, and that it was fun.

Decadence in our era comes in technologically mediated forms, emptied of desire and obsessed with self-optimisation

Do you want to have a good time? You know, really enjoy yourself? Click here, and tell us your desires. Maybe it’s a new outfit, or some exotic cuisine delivered anonymously and steaming hot to your door. Maybe it’s porn or gambling. Perhaps you prefer the infinite scroll, the endlessly unfurling ribbon of glossy images and videos starring people you’ll never meet doing things you’ll never do. Or maybe you favor talking to a chatbot who will assure you that you are the most special of all its users.

For anyone with an Internet connection and a little discretionary income, the contemporary moment offers a superabundance of seductive distractions. Why then the pervasive mood of emptiness? Why are so many at once overstimulated and bored?

PM says that without rapid action the NHS could effectively collapse, in first full interview since entering No 10

Andy Burnham has pledged to use “whatever political capital I have” to finally fix the crumbling social care system in England, saying that without rapid action the NHS could effectively collapse.

In his first full interview since becoming prime minister last week, Burnham said he could not put a timetable on the arrival of a new system for social care but that its creation would take time.

Blazes near Madrid coming under control but efforts to contain huge fire near Bordeaux hampered by windy conditions while another heatwave forecast

• What is a ‘fire cloud’, and how have they worsened wildfires in Europe?

Authorities in France battled to contain a huge wildfire near Bordeaux as the forecast of another heatwave threatened to deepen the crisis and the Spanish prime minister, Pédro Saánchez, warned Spain and the Iberian peninsula were suffering the effects of the climate emergency.

Windy conditions on Saturday night hampered efforts to extinguish the blaze in the Gironde region of south-western France – which has consumed an area four times the size of Paris and caused nearly 220,000 people to be evacuated.

Ukrainian president will be first overseas visitor for new British prime minister

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will become Andy Burnham’s first overseas visitor as prime minister, in a visit that Burnham said underlined Britain’s “unwavering” backing for Ukraine.

Less than two weeks after Keir Starmer travelled to Kyiv for the final foreign visit of his prime ministership, the Ukrainian president will on Monday join Burnham at a naval base where Ukrainian forces have been receiving training.

Exclusive: Judge intends to consider ‘terrorist connection’ after convicting five for damage to Barclays in Burnley

Five Palestine Action activists face being sentenced as terrorists for breaking windows and throwing red paint at a branch of Barclays Bank in Lancashire.

Brendon O’Hagan, 28; Amanda Kelly, 31; Humeera Atiqnisar, 31; Mohammed Malik, 28; and Alma Yaniv, 70, were found guilty of causing £212,000 of damage during a direct action protest in Burnley in August 2024. They targeted the bank because it held shares in the Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems.