Ah, Christmas. Goodwill to all men, figgy puddings, the first dusting of snow, the scent of nutmeg in the air.

Creepy old men who look like retired cowboy transvestites. Said creepy old men bawling Here Comes Santa Claus in a way that’s so off-kilter and tuneless that it inadvertently leads every child who hears it to believe that Santa Claus is some sort of dangerous child molester, and then honking gracelessly into a harmonica for 45 minutes until the festive spirit of goodwill has been obliterated completely.

That’s right – Bob Dylan is bringing out a Christmas album. It will be wonderful.

Trying to second-guess Bob Dylan is about as definitively futile as it gets. He delights in wrong-footing the world, whether it’s by getting arrested near Bruce Springsteen’s house or recording a GPS navigation commentary – both of which he’s done in the last fortnight – or steadfastly refusing to record a listenable album since about 1976. And, by jove, he’s gone and done it again.

Because, you see, Bob Dylan has decided to record an album of Christmas standards. Christmas In The Heart will include festive staples such as Winter Wonderland, Must Be Santa and Little Drummer Boy.

And it promises to tap into the very spirit of Christmas itself – specifically the spirit of answering your door to what you believe are carol singers on Christmas Eve, only to discover that you’re actually being serenaded by a tatty-looking homeless man with a mouse in his pocket, a bottle of cheap gin in his hand and more vomit than one human could ever produce on his own down his trousers.

Oh, alright. It’s for charity. Spoilsports. ABC News reports:

Dylan will donate all his U.S. royalties from album sales to the charity group Feeding America. Feeding America said it expects to provide meals to 1.4 million people this holiday season with the album proceeds. Dylan plans to donate his international royalties to two charity organizations that give meals to needy people in Britain and the developing world.

As obviously philanthropic as this is, we’d like to warn Bob Dylan of two things. First, he should remember that people who make successful Christmas albums often go on to shoot women in the face. Second, he should remember that while making a charity Christmas album is a nice gesture, following it up with a charity Halloween album definitely isn’t. Nobody wants to hear Bob Dylan huff and wheeze his way through, say, a 12-minute acoustic version of Thriller.

Oh, like any of that matters anyway. This is Bob Dylan we’re talking about – he could release an album of armpit farts and the Mojo office would still have to crack open a window to stop everyone drowning in excited jism. So, for once, we’re going to withhold judgement on Christmas In The Heart. But know this, Dylan, you go anywhere near Little Donkey and we’ll cut your bloody balls off.

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9 - You know why you haven’t a got a girlfriend? It’s because you don’t smell enough of meat – KTLA

8 - Gratuitous self-promotion of the week, part one: Stu’s foolproof Christmas survival guide, over at Kontraband

7 - Transformers 3 has a release date. Merry Christmas! – Darkhorizons

6 - Beyonce continues to walk in the footsteps of Michael Douglas. Next week: Falling Down! – Best Week Ever

5 - Eight Guinness world record attempts. Eight spectacular failures – Cracked

4 - Look at 100 cereal boxes. LOOK AT THEM! – Alanvalek

3 - The ten best Britney Spears moments of all time. Seriously. Someone found ten – BuddyTV

2 – And speaking of Britney Spears, don’t think she’s forgotten about you if you don’t celebrate Christmas – Digitalspy

1 - RABBIT IN A WHEELCHAIR! - YouTube

9 - The best and worst Christmas songs ever. Each of them, in its own way, is magical – Metromix

8 - 100mph train crash test - YouTube

7 – Delicious food that might kill you - Asylum

6 - Disgusting food that won’t. Genuine request: does anyone know where we can buy these? – Flickr

5 - 10 safe for work sexual fetishes to spice up your tonight – Booshmagazine

4 - Not really gamey enough for a Slackerjack, yet still weirdly satisfying – 4mations

3 - Teddy bears in space. Either very cute or very, very lonely – Dailymail

2 - Creepy Santas. Barricade your chimneys - OMGlists

1 - A ROBOT made of LEGO that can solve RUBIK’S CUBES? This is THE FUTURE! - I Am Bored

One gift that has multiple uses and is quite affordable is Log. Sadly, Log has been overlooked in the commercial sector despite its multiple uses. Why pay for something that is so cost effective like Log? It entertains in so many different ways – just watch the advert. Go on, shun your electrical contraption this year and invest in Log, you’ll definitely be thanking us on Christmas day.

If you don’t buy your child a Log this Christmas, then it’s quite plausible your child will turn out like the various hecklerspray writers. And no-one wants their offspring snorting washing up liquid and having strange obsessions with cats for kicks. Unless you’re wrong in the head, of course.

Apparently this is a desire that many of us share, which is why M&S has decided to ward off economic collapse by advertising Christmas using its normal collection of models in conjunction with Take That, who Happen To Have An Album Out. And what fun they all seem to be having – look, there’s Twiggy greeting the boys with a welcome note that looks like used to be used for holding children to ransom! Look, there’s Mark Owen trying to distract everyone from the fact he resembles Old Man Steptoe more and more with every passing day by cuddling a tinselly puppy!

Look, there’s the startlingly masculine model acting out Bernie Clifton: The Motion Picture during a game of charades! Look, there’s everyone getting progressively drunker and drunker until they inevitably end up in a disgusting swingers’ orgy where Lily Cole will have to end up with the tinselly dog because Robbie Williams isn’t in the band any more!

Look, M&S, you’ve gone about this all wrong. Christmas is about goodwill to all men. And what sort of goodwill do you think you’re promoting by waiting a full 77 seconds before letting Noemi Lenoir get her bra out? You utter sods.

And, now that the big hoo-hah about his resignation from Strictly Come Dancing has finally died down, the world of slightly tawdry opportunities has been opened to him. John Sergeant can now do whatever he likes – he can release a lazily-ghostwritten autobiography about his time on Strictly Come Dancing, he can take Kerry Katona’s place as the face of Iceland, he can even bring out his own perfume if he likes. But only if he decides to call it Gout by John Sergeant. That’s a dealbreaker.

But, no, John Sergeant is far too classy to try anything so shallo… what? John Sergeant isn’t too classy for any of that? In fact John Sergeant has such an inherent lack of class that he’s bringing out a Christmas single? And it’s a duet with Adrian Chiles from The One Show? Here’s a challenge – you’ve got all day to think of a worse idea than that. You won’t be able to.

As everyone knows, the traditional figurehead of Christmas is a jolly old fat bloke who can just about manage a single day’s worth of strenuous activity a year before needing to take several months off afterwards to recuperate. Everyone loves him, even though he looks like he’s enjoyed so much free booze and food in his life that he could keel over clutching his chest any minute.

But enough about John Sergeant, Christmas is also about Santa Claus, too.

John Sergeant’s talent for dancing like a hobbled pensioner trying to discharge himself from hospital without anyone noticing meant that he quickly became the people’s champion on Strictly Come Dancing. Or at least he was before he decided that he didn’t like lady Scousers with faces like sunken bread dough being nasty to him and resigned from the show in a flounce a couple of weeks ago.

But that happened a couple of weeks ago – a lifetime in reality TV shows. Now the people’s champion is Martina Navratilova or that bloke from Dollar or any number of the utterly interchangeable WAGs on I’m Not A Celebrity But I Still Expect You To Care About Me, and that leaves John Sergeant in something of a pickle.

With all the public goodwill towards him evaporating at a devastating rate, John Sergeant knows that he has to make a bold move to stem the tide; an all or nothing roll of the dice that will either consolidate his fame for years to come or see him wheeled out to the dustbin like a pile of broken-veined rubbish. So that’s what he’s done. And, as the News Of The World reports, the result literally doesn’t make any sense at all:

Strictly hero John Sergeant has swapped Cha Cha Cha for La La La – and recorded a SONG in a bid to be the Christmas No1. We can reveal that the flat-footed political journalist has teamed up with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley of The One Show to make the charity single. An insider said: “John is such hot property right now and The One Show is delighted to have him involved. As for whether his singing is better than his dancing, the great British public will ultimately decide that.”

Oh, brilliant – a Christmas single. A Christmas single performed by the dreary-voiced man who used to be on the news and the dreary-voiced man who does the pointless show that comes after The Apprentice that reminds everyone exactly what happened on the episode of The Apprentice that they were just watching. Singing a song that reminds people about human suffering. Sounds like a winner to us.

Actually that’s slightly unfair of us – we haven’t heard this Adrian Chiles/ John Sergeant Christmas song yet, so for all we know it might be brilliant. To be fair, the primary reason we haven’t heard this Adrian Chiles/ John Sergeant Christmas song yet is because it almost certainly won’t be brilliant and we’ll end up wanting to hang ourselves by the start of the second verse, but still. Christmas, eh?

Read more:

Top Of The Chops – News Of The World

The next major party on our calendar is that of our lord saviour Jesus Christ. When he was born on December 25, not only did he know he’d be worshiped by millions, but he’d have to die for our sins. Sorry about that Jesus – we didn’t mean to squash the neighbour’s cat when reversing down the street.

Instead of it being called Jesus day, that day is often referred to as Christmas. While we use it to chomp on dry turkey, multinational corporations use it as a tool to promote their badly-made product.

Bearing in mind that it’s only just November, DFS are already telling us to buy quickly so they can deliver an Italian three-piece suite to our house in time for Christmas. Last time we checked, sofas and Jesus had nothing in common. That’s unless he was a greasy Italian man who made chairs and talked in a funny accent while eating pizza.

This advert isn’t the worst one we’ve seen on TV, but the fact that Christmas is being whored out to us now is nothing short of depressing. Every year Christmas seems to be arriving that little bit quicker. Expect Easter eggs to be prominently displayed from the 2nd of January 2009. You know, so you can buy early and save precious pennies.

So make the most of them while you can, because you might not see any more of them. According to reports, Madonna and Guy Ritchie now hate each other so much that they only communicate through staff, and they’re both keen on getting a divorce finalised by Christmas.

This really is a win-win – if they’re not getting divorced, we get to look at more photos of Guy Ritchie and Madonna in public trying to pretend that they like one another. And if they are getting divorced? Well, that means the rest of us have a shot at the gnarly-clawed single mother and the potato-faced idiot that have just come onto the market. Everyone’s happy.

Yes, we know what you’re thinking. Every couple of weeks there’s a new story about how Madonna and Guy Ritchie are getting divorced, but the divorce never materialises. In fact, if you believe everything you read about Madonna and Guy Ritchie you’d be forgiven for thinking that their marriage is a kind of hellish mixture of Who’s Afraid Of Virgina Woolf? and the bit in Saw 3 with the pig guts and the mincer.

There were rumours of a Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce two years ago, but nothing happened. Then, more recently, Madonna hired a divorce lawyer right before it emerged she was somehow involved in the break-up of Alex Rodriguez’s marriage, but no divorce emerged.

That means everything’s OK between Madonna and Guy Ritchie, doesn’t it? Especially since every single divorce rumour has been met head-on with a choreographed excursion where Madonna and Guy Ritchie go out to dinner to prove their love in front of the media, even though they always both look utterly miserable and stand about as far away from each other as they possibly can while still holding hands. That’s how all married couples display their love, isn’t it?

Well, no. And if today’s reports can be believed, then Madonna and Guy Ritchie will be completely divorced by Christmas because that’s just how much they hate each other. The Sun reports:

Madonna and Guy Ritchie are to divorce, The Sun can exclusively reveal. A statement confirming their marriage is over has been prepared and is set to be released imminently. The couple are going public with their split because they “can’t bear to live with the pretence any longer.” … She and Guy, 40, want a divorce finalised before Christmas.

We’ll have to see if this divorce talk is true, or whether it means Madonna and Guy Ritchie will have to roll out another frosty crag-faced outing for the press. But if it is true, then it’s terribly sad news. They’ve been together for almost eight years now – if they get divorced then how are they going to divide up all of Madonna’s stuff? And, you know, who gets to keep David Banda? Madonna or the bloke who never even wanted him in the first place? It’s a toughie.

Either way, if Madonna and Guy Ritchie really are getting divorced, then we wish the best for both of them. It’s obviously a better solution than just carrying on living miserably with each other – plus this way they get to play the field a bit now.

After all, even though Madonna is 50 now, she could probably still take her pick of most men if she wanted. And, who knows, now that RocknRolla’s been released there’s a chance that Guy Ritchie might even get a pity shag if he sets his sights impossibly low enough.

Not content with ruining the dreams and emotions of a billion little kids and a lot of adults who probably should know better, Daniel Radcliffe and company’s decision to move the new Harry Potter film to next summer has prompted Sony to push the upcoming James Bond flick – the one with the funny name – back.

Alright, so it’s only a week, with the film being pushed from November 7th to the 14th, but still – come on. Give us a break here.

The reason for the move was given as a simple one: ‘we want more money’. Technically not what they actually said, but ‘moving it closer to the Thanksgiving/Christmas market’ is pretty transparent when it comes to reasoning.

While we do wish we could live in a world where money wasn’t such a driving factor, where advertising wasn’t so rampantly killing off the reputations of entertainers and where focus groups didn’t decide what we could watch and when… well, we don’t. Which means you have to wait an extra week to see Quantum of Solace in the US.

We don’t, mind, as we’re in Britain. We still get the thing on October 31st, which makes us a great deal better than you, our wonderful trans-Atlantic chums. In your face! It also shows that the film isn’t being pushed back because of any kind of curse that may be going around, which is nice.

Speaking to Variety, the Sony chairman of something and something else blah distribution world said:

“We believe Nov. 14 is a great date that allows us to play straight through Thanksgiving and right into Christmas. We believe this decision will give the public a wider opportunity to see the film over the holiday.”

Like we said – it’s pretty transparent in the reasoning, but they still try and hide the fact that the decision was made for more delicious, life-giving money. Instead, it’s put as being for your benefit. Bless them – they really do care about you*.

Nevertheless, the wait for Jimmy Bond’s latest outing is sure to be worth it, with the trailer making it out to be one long fight. We’re not complaining – two hours of brawling is something hecklerspray would pay good money to see, along with paying $250 for other activities.

To make the wait that little bit easier, check out the official song to Quantum of Solace – far better than this poorly-thought-out effort by two relative unknowns – as provided by the world-renowned composer Joe Cornish**:

It certainly works better than the original teaser.

*They don’t care about you.

** This is all a lie. It is not the official song. He is a British comedian.

Amy Winehouse? Don't be silly – we're talking about the queen of substance-deranged power-ballads here, not the scabby-faced pretender to her crack-addled throne, here. That's right, Whitney Houston is back.

Well, sort of back. Whitney Houston's comeback album – her first for six years – will be released in time for Christmas. It'd be ready sooner, but it's going to take nine months of round-the-clock labour to photoshop the album's artwork so it looks like Whitney Houston's pupils are the same size and that she's got teeth and generally looks a bit less identical to Samuel L Jackson in Jungle Fever.

If the American government wants to catch Osama Bin Laden, it'll have its best shot at the end of the year. Everyone knows that Osama has a giant crush on Whitney Houston, and Whitney Houston has a new album coming out in the later stages of 2008, so if the CIA wants to know where he is, he'll either be found at the new releases section of HMV or smooshed up against the Today show window mouthing "Death to America! Marry me Whitney!" when Whitney inevitably does her comeback interview.

Yes, just when you though she'd given up music forever in favour of batting away imaginary demons in a crack-blasted frenzy, Whitney Houston is back. It's been a long journey for Whitney over the last few years – as well as being smashed out of her mind on hard drugs, she's also ended her possibly-abusive marriage to Bobby Brown, was forced to sell off just about everything she owns to prevent losing her house and had to endure dozens of witless arseholes murdering her best-known songs on Simon Cowell TV shows. No wonder she turned to crack.

But that's all in the past now, because the new Whitney Houston comeback album is almost ready according to Whitney's record label boss Clive Davis. Reuters reports:

Four songs have been completed for the as-yet-untitled project, and four more will be put to tape later this month, Davis said during Billboard's Music & Money Symposium at New York's St. Regis Hotel. "We're on track for a holiday release," he said. "We're not going to compromise who she is to fit into today's hip-hop radio market. The public wants Whitney material." Tracks earmarked for the album have been produced or written by Black Eyed Peas singer will.i.am, producer/songwriter Sean Garrett and R&B singer Akon.

OK, two things immediately come to mind here. 1) Four songs? That's rubbish – Whitney Houston's comeback was announced 17 months ago. That's 119 days a song. At this rate we'll be lucky to hear the Whitney Houston comeback album before the Sun expands and engulfs the earth, and 2) Did Clive Davis mean to say "The public wants Whitney material?" Because if Akon and will.i.am are in charge then we think he might have meant "The public wants material that sounds like it's from a fizzy drink commercial."

Still, however dubious we are of Whitney Houston's comeback album ever happening, we've got our fingers crossed that it does. Not only will it give Whitney Houston a feeling of success that she's been missing for a decade, but it'll also mean that we won't have to see shelves full of lazily-repackaged Whitney Houston Greatest Hits albums like we've done for every year of our adult lives. And that has to be worth something.

Read more:

New Whitney Houston album set for holiday release – Reuters 

Nope. Because Mika wants to get in on Amy's plans for a Christmas album.

Mika seems to be under the impression that an Amy Winehouse Christmas album would be much better with him in it because she's Jewish and he's partly related to someone who's been to Lebanon once, or something. But, hey, anything that exposes Mika to a career-threatening hard drug addiction is fine with us.

It's been a year since Mika got to number one with that Grace Kelly song of his, and what a year it's been. Not only did he release Grace Kelly, but he also released a bunch of other songs that not even Mika's biggest fans could hum if you held a gun to their heads. True, Mika helped stall a Boyzone reunion – so fair play to that – but unless he gets his act together sharpish, there's a good chance that Mika will become another quickly forgotten, funny-haired one hit wonder.

So what can Mika do? Piggyback around on someone much more famous to remind everyone that he's still alive? OK!

Mika has caught word that Amy Winehouse is going to temporarily switch smoking crack for singing soon, to record an album of Christmas and Hanukkah standard. Now, yes, we know that the Christmas album is basically an admission of creative bankruptcy, but ask yourself this – would you rather listen to a recovering crack addict singing Little Donkey or a double concept emo-jazz album entitled Requiem For My Blakey? Quite, so shut up.

Anyway, that's not the point. Mika's heard about Amy Winehouse's Christmas album and now he's so desperate to join in that he probably let a little bit of wee come out. You see, Mika doesn't just think that combining his camp gonk-pop and Amy Winehouse's thousand-year-old roar would make a perfect Christmas present – he thinks that it'll bring peace to the Middle East forever. The Sun reports:

The flamboyant singer revealed: "I heard Amy will be recording an album of Jewish music once she gets well and I’d like to make a contribution to it. I really like her music. Think about this – me, a part-Lebanese artist working on a Jewish album. I think that’s a nice statement. I’d like to make a statement some day."

Unless that statement is along the lines of "I'm giving up music forever to become a penniless hermit, plus I'm sewing my mouth up," then we expect that there's going to be a lot of profoundly disappointed people around. 

Although maybe there is something to Mika's comment. Perhaps world peace can only be achieved by a hokey cash-in carol-singing album by a drug addict and a gay-looking man with a Freddy Mercury complex. After all, if painstaking negotiation and flat-out violence hasn't worked, then it's probably worth trying to unite the Arabs and the Jews through a united sense of crippling shame.

Read more:

Mika makes Amy a kosher offer – The Sun 

The fact that ‘downtrodden’ almost rhymes with ‘wooden’ isn’t just a coincidence; Kylie’s performance was lacking in parts, but fortunately that didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment. The special was set on board the spaceship Titanic and, you guessed it, something went wrong.

Despite the crew and passengers of this intergalactic cruise liner appearing oblivious to Earth’s cultures, the ship was strangely jam-packed with accurate Earth-o-bilia, with one man even boasting of owning a genuine Earth antique dinner jacket.

Throughout the Doctor Who special, it was important to constantly remind yourself that we hadn’t travelled back in time; the passengers were just far more advanced technologically than us. Despite looking the same, wearing the same clothes, and using familiar looking mobile phones, they are more advanced, honest.

This episode was quite reminiscent of the original Poseidon Adventure, with a handily cross-sectional group trying to trawl through the wreckage of the Titanic after being struck by meteors. It later transpired that this was a deliberate act of sabotage on behalf of the gold-toothed man who previously ran the cruise liner company, Max Capricorn, as part of a dastardly plan to exact revenge upon the board who voted him out.

The group, led by the Doctor, had representatives from Titanic; an overweight couple who won their tickets (Leonardo DiCaprio), a selfish upper-class man (Billy Zane), a talking lychee (Fruit), and Kylie Minogue (Kylie Minogue).

A saccharine moment between Kylie and the lychee ensued which touched on lychee-phobia, explaining how they were no longer shunned and could even get married. Comparisons with homosexuality aside, it was moments such as this which seemed rushed, or added as an afterthought. Thankfully, the Doctor seemed as disinterested in the micro-histories of each character as we were, blissfully ignoring them while preparing his cringeworthy speech about being 903 years old, a time lord, and overly dramatic.

An entertaining although tired plot with spectacular special effects and most important of all, Doctor Who saves the Queen and her Corgis. While excruciatingly painful in places, the wincing was worthwhile even just to hear that immortal line, “only Britain is great.”

[review by Keith Emmerson]

A guest at the party has described how she could hear the group of players having an orgy with the young girl in a hotel room. She told The Sun:

"I was upstairs in the hotel gossiping with a friend when I heard cheering and clapping noises coming from one of the rooms. We could hear the voices of around five or six men – together with the groaning noises of a girl who was clearly having sex."

A completely invented – by us, just now – rumour has suggested that the players involved were Dutch goalkeeper Edwin Van Der Sar, Irish utility man John O’Shea, Argentine bull-dog Carlos Tevez, assistant manager Carlos Queiroz with his pet hyena Hermione and Gary Neville – the apparent ringleader – who had previously shocked revellers at the bash at Great St. John Street Hotel by turning up in a flowing cape and Venetian carnival papier-mache mask.

From the same unfounded source came the news that Mr Tevez, who is still working hard on his English, took the slang term ‘roasting’ a little too literally and was given a stern telling off when Neville caught him pre-heating the oven to gas mark six. The impressionable Tevez commented that he had found the apparent order to murder the girl a little strange, and was literally delighted to learn the true definition of the word. The witness continued:

"The men were shrieking like hyenas and shouting, 'Get in there'. My mate and I sat shocked as it was so vile. After a few minutes the men filed out of the room laughing, and rushed downstairs for more booze. The girl then came staggering out boasting she had just had sex with all the men. She was clearly very drunk and very pretty, and probably about 19 years old. I was shocked by the idea there had been an orgy at the party. It felt so sleazy."

Said the girl, as she sold her story to the national tabloid with a daily circulation of about 3.1 million.

OK, enough of the nonsense. Not one player has been named or linked to the orgy, we made that Gary Neville thing up, believe it or not; there was no cape or papier-mache mask and, however much we’d love to believe it, Carlos Queiroz does not own a pet Hyena called Hermione.

So don’t believe what we’ve said. But try not to believe what this self-proclaimed gossiping witness says either; are we really to believe that – in the throes of sexual ecstasy – a professional footballer would actually shout "get in there," shriek like a hyena and cap it all off with a round of applause? Even if that footballer was Gary Neville? Well…

Read more: 

3 Man U stars roasted girl No2 - The Sun 

Folded:

• Happy Christmas! (ready to fight with the family?)

• Getting a couple of days off (‘cos that’s really all it’s about)

• Granite by Pendulum (retro drum ‘n’bass with lyrics…yeah, why not)

• We Own the Night (a bitter taste to cut through the syrupy festive fare)

• Erin O’Connor (tall, slim, very pretty lady from the M&S Christmas adverts)

Creased:

• Happy Humbug! (all ready to hide out in Acapulco?)

• Late postmen (what time of day to call is 2.00 pm?! It'd be quicker to send a midget with bubble gum stuck on his feet)

• Shops abandoning their Christmas decorations in favour of giant SALE placards (a miserable thing to see and probably even worse if you have to work in these un-festive havens of grumpiness)

• Frosty mornings (a thin layer of concrete on your windscreen and only the heartiest, most deadly of £1.99 chemicals can help you remove it)

• New Year’s Eve washout (can somebody we know please do something classy like go to a ball or watch fireworks while sipping a glass of Moet. Break the cycle, please)

And that's no different this year. Leon Jackson, winner of X Factor and a young man so crushingly inarticulate that his primary method of communication is weeping, has been all but guaranteed this year's Christmas number one with his song I Believe or Believe In Me or When You Believe or I Preconceive That My Sleeve Believes Its Weave's Called Steve. Not only that, but When You Believe by Leon Jackson looks set to become the fastest-selling single of the year, selling 300,000 copies in less than a week. That's not the only record When You Believe's broken, either – it's also the only Christmas number one with a tune that nobody can remember even when they've just finished listening to it.

Winning X Factor can change your life completely. Look at Leona Lewis. 14 months ago she was just another Simon Cowell talent show pleb going "woooahaoaha" all over Whitney Houston records on TV, but now she's a multimillion-selling artiste who gets to go "woooahaoaha" over songs written especially for her that only sound like Whitney Houston records. The difference is staggering.

And that's the future that X Factor winner Leon Jackson has to look forward to, if record sales of his first single When You Believe are anything to go by. By all estimations, When You Believe by Leon Jackson is going to be this year's Christmas number one even though a) it's awful, b) it means that Simon Cowell has stretched his run of talent show Christmas number ones to three painful years, c) it's not as good as that song about everyone dying alone and d) it's awful.

According to HMV, When You Believe by Leon Jackson is shaping up to be the fastest-selling single of the year as well as Christmas number one, selling 300,000 this week alone. HMV bigwig Gennaro Castaldo says:

"Even at this early stage it looks like being Leon all the way."

But that's inevitable, isn't it? The winner of X Factor always gets Christmas number one. Even if the show was won by a goose choking on a half-swallowed string of spaghetti – or worse, Chico – it'd still get Christmas number one. So we shouldn't judge Leon Jackson yet. No, we must wait until his first album of red-eyed lazily-slurred awkward cruise-ship swing covers farts into the shops next year. Then we can judge him. 

But, hey, if When You Believe by Leon Jackson is going to be the Christmas number one, who are the also-rans? Well, currently in second place is that Katie Melua cover version of What A Wonderful World that appears to have only been recorded to soundtrack bitterly ironic suicides, followed by Leona Lewis and then Fairytale Of New York by Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, which got a boost this week because of Radio 1 wanking about with the bleeper button. 

So congratulations to Leon Jackson, who'll go down in history as a Christmas number one even though his song's rubbish. We don't know how Leon plans to celebrate his Christmas number one yet, but we have a feeling it'll involve crying his whole body into dust. 

Still, could've been worse. Same Difference could've won.

Read more:

"X Factor" winner tipped for top spot – Reuters