It’s Christmas time and there’s a genuine reason to feel afraid.<\/p>\n
For the next few weeks, it’ll be impossible to escape Wham and their story of giving people their internal organs; Noddy Holder’s foghorn declaration of festive joy; or Mariah Carey’s yuletide wishlist (principal item: You).<\/p>\n
All of those songs have bounced back into this week’s Top 40; and with grim inevitability, one of them is almost guaranteed to be this year’s Christmas number one.<\/p>\n
It’s a feature and a flaw of the way the charts are calculated.<\/p>\n
Ever since streaming figures were incorporated into the countdown, golden oldies have trampled over contemporary hits every December.<\/p>\n
How’s that for clanging chimes of doom?<\/p>\n
There’s an argument that those songs should be siloed into a separate chart \u2013 in the same way that compilations are excluded from the album countdown.<\/p>\n
But in our world of plenty, maybe I can spread a smile of joy (sorry, I promise I’ll drop this now). Because this year, to save you from tears, there’s some genuine competiton.<\/p>\n
Here’s a look at who could become your new Christmas favourite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s Christmas time and there’s a genuine reason to feel afraid. For the next few weeks, it’ll be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302420,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-302419","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}