There are crudely two ways of marketing a Christmas single. That’s because crudely (and these are Christmas singles so sophistication is right out of the window) there are two types of Yuletide tune. There is the gung-ho, sleigh-bell a-jangling “isn’t it great – this Christmas thing”. But there is also the Christmas ballad, whinging about how shit it is to be single at Christmas. The first kind of single appeals to every idiot who has ever enjoyed an office Christmas party. The second is aimed directly at girls who have tight boyfriends.
Your tight boyfriend, your Andrew Ridgley some might say (tight skin once his nose job was done) does a balancing act. Yes – Christmas snogs can be nice, but your girlfriend might want stuff like presents bought for her. All expensive. So if she isn’t much of a looker, dump her. And she’ll go down to Woolies crying her eyes out and fork out her pocket money, and the money she was going to spend on a Roy Of The Rovers Annual for him on this Wham! Single instead.
Indeed old Yog and his big nosed mate came up with a cash cow with this one. It’s a simple tale of man, woman and a particularly heart surgeon. I always imagined it taking place in Harefield Hospital – but the video suggested the complicated heart based shenanigans took place on a ski-ing trip (proving point one of the Christmas video, let it snow). It turns out that George got involved with a young lady with some kind of heart problem, and therefore offered to give his heart to her. But lack of gratitude was the order of the day, because on Boxing Day she gave the heart away. (Imagine how much the heart surgeon would charge for working on both Christmas and Boxing Day).
What’s worse, this year George intends to give it away again. This suggests that either he has two hearts – like Doctor Who – or somewhere along the line he got his original heart back after being kept alive by complicated machinery. Machinery considerably more expensive that the Roland synths producing the cod twinkly backing track. Anyway, it is not documented what happened after he gave his heart away the second time – but one can only assume that he did not do all that well – since he went off girls around then and started liking boys better.
Moral. The only winner in Last Christmas is the surgeon. The listener certainly isn’t.