Richard Osman's 'World Cup of Christmas Songs' has named its champion

It’s a question that comes up every year: what’s the best Christmas song? People get incredibly passionate about music at this time of year - even people who don’t have particularly strong opinions about anything else will suddenly proclaim they’d take a bullet for Mariah. There are heated arguments about whether that Destiny’s Child one is any good or not, and what that one with the trombone solo is called. 

Richard Osman from Pointless has conducted a week-long World Cup tournament on Twitter (with over a million votes across the whole thing) to find a definitive answer to the best Christmas song of all time, which is…

Fairytale Of New York, by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl.

It was incredibly close - like, closer than Brexit. Last Christmas by Wham! missed out by a smidge, with 49% of the vote. All I Want For Christmas Is You and Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day were in third and fourth place.

So, Fairytale Of New York. A few things that seem worth pointing out…
- It’s not really a Christmas song, is it? Like, it’s set at Christmas, but it’s not really, really a Christmas song
- It’s got a nasty word in it that shitheads get really excited about being allowed to use
- On two occasions it rhymes the word “one” with the word “one”, which isn’t a fucking rhyme
- “They’ve got cars big as bars” isn’t a very good line, is it?
- There isn’t an NYPD choir
- Last Christmas is excellent and better and was robbed

Any time Shane MacGowan is mentioned, it’s fun to remember how he lost some of his teeth. He was so pissed once that he thought he was conducting talks with American leaders following a third world war, and to prove what he thought of American culture, took a bite out of volume three of The Beach Boys’ greatest hits. That is SO PISSED. 

(Image: iStock)