Last Christmas Unwrapped review: Andrew Ridgeley and friends reunited show how George Michael and Wham! captured the real meaning of Christmas

George's song, recorded at the absolute apogee of Wham!'s success, just gets that amid all the glitter, and the food and the twinkly lights there is – for this 80s pop kid anyway – a real undercurrent of sadness.

Singer Sam Smith gets it too, interviewed in this lovely documentary, a show that will not so much infuse you with the Christmas spirit, as douse you in it and set you alight like a Christmas pudding.

“It's like a diary entry, it's like hearing someone's private thoughts,” says Smith. “For me, I love a sad Christmas song, there's a melancholy I really lean into.”

And Last Christmas really is a melancholy song, from the very first line onward, sugar-coated with sleigh bells and George's beautiful vocals.

And Last Christmas Unwrapped is a melancholy film, this time lightened by the 'stars' of the Last Christmas video – including George's Wham! bandmate Andrew Ridgeley, backing singers Pepsi and Shirlie and their old school pals – reuniting in the same location, Saas-Fee, in the Swiss Alps.

It does retread much of the same ground as this year's Wham! documentary on Netflix, but this relies on the chemistry between the group of friends George and Andrew built around them during the formative Wham! years.

These friends from Bushey, where the boys grew up, starred in the video for Last Christmas, with actual wine making for a memorably 'relaxed' shoot, and seeing these greying 60-plus year olds cavorting about in the snow brought up the Christmas feeling of community and togetherness.

Of course, the problem is that one of those friends is missing – George himself, who died on Christmas Day in 2016.

The more you hear about him, the more you come to realise what a loss he was. Generous to a fault, he gave all his royalties from Last Christmas to Band Aid, whose Do They Know It's Christmas beat Wham! to the festive No.1 spot in 1984.

He also loved Christmas and would organise Christmas Eve parties for all his friends, including those old school pals from Bushey.

According to Shirlie's pop star husband Martin Kemp, George “was Mr Christmas, he worked really hard keeping these friends together and he knew if he wasn't there and doing those Christmas parties, that friendship group would dissipate – and it did”.

It's that tinge of sadness which makes the song all the better. To me, it captures that Christmassy mix of joy and sadness better than anything.

Engineer Chris Porter, who helped George record the song in the summer of 1984, says “it's a growing up song, it's a love song, it's a loss song”, and it is all of things.

Sam Smith recognises it too: “The song lives on and even though the lyrics are sad, I can imagine so many joyful moments have been shared to the at song.”

And he's right. The people who love the joy of Christmas can hum along to the bouncy tune, while those of us for whom the season is, let's say, problematic, can listen to the lyrics, words which talk of a “soul of ice” and being torn apart.

In the end, Last Christmas Unwrapped was a snow-capped, twinkly tribute to one of the greats of pop music, and the greatest Christmas song, and what could be more Christmassy than that?

Meanwhile, George will continue to sing Last Christmas on streaming platforms worldwide, speaking direct from his heart to yours. And who would give that away?