1978: WEST BROM's Tour of CHINA | World About Us | Classic BBC Sports Documentary | BBC Archive

At the end of last season West Bromwich Albion, like many other top British soccer teams, went on tour. But the Albion's tour was unusual: a three-week visit to the People's Republic of China.

And so it came to pass that football stars like Cyrille Regis, John Trewick, Bryan Robson, John Wile, Brendon Batson, Tony 'Bomber' Brown, Laurie Cunningham, Alistair Brown and their manager Ron Atkinson were joined by international referee Jack Taylor and a smattering of other British footballing dignitaries for a handful of matches on the other side of the globe. They were accompanied on this unprecedented trip by a circus of officials, consultants, businessmen, guides, journalists and a television crew, as the toured Peking, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Guangzhou.

How did highly-paid British soccer players cope with opponents for whom "friendship comes before competition"? What was it like to play in front of 80,000 identically-dressed spectators in an atmosphere very different from home? What about the food, the language, the culture? What did they make of China's Maoist way of life? Above all, how did the Midlands' heroes react to the Chinese and what did the Chinese make of them?

Presented by Julian Pettifer

Cameraman: David South

Editor: Edward Roberts

Producer: Colin Luke

Clip taken from The World About Us: Albion in the Orient, originally broadcast on BBC Two, 24 September, 1978.

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