I’VE been avoiding shopping in the past couple of weeks. Apart from the fact that I’ve been far too busy to spare much of a thought for Christmas-related stuff (I know, I know – bah, humbug) it’s the tinny Christmas music that’s squirting out all over shop floors that I can happily run a mile from.

Every time I hear Merry Christmas Everybody! from Slade, I can’t help but conjure up a mental picture of Dave Hill, the one with the ridiculous non-fringe haircut, the big-tooth grin and the spangly platform boots that he always looked he was about to fall off. He certainly wasn’t a pin-up on my bedroom wall, nor was fellow member Noddy Holder, come to that.

Slade held the number-one spot in the UK charts over Christmas 1973 with their offering and many of the Christmas tunes we hear today are from that era – probably because we were all desperate to have something to cheer us up in what proved to be a dark decade in more ways than one. Power cuts, strikes, rubbish lining the streets – you name it, we had it.

In 1974 we had Mud’s Lonely This Christmas and Johnny Mathis warbling When A Child Is Born in 1976, but then, in 1977, Paul McCartney’s Wings boringly, dirge-ingly inflicted upon us Mull Of Kintyre.

For nine whole weeks that was number one and by the end of it I was ready to burst into tears, such was its lack of joie de vivre and general flatness. Listening to it was like watching paint dry or porridge set…

Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe And Wine from 1988 was almost as bad (all together now – sway dreamily and vacantly in time with the chorus…) but not quite. Although it’s a close-run thing…

But what of other Christmas number ones? Who remembers in 1969 grannies weeping into their antimacassars whenever they heard Rolf Harris singing his tear-jerking, hanky-wringing saga about Two Little Boys graduating from their childhood rocking horse to the real thing on some imaginary battlefield years later?

Then in 1970 we had blinking, squinting Benny Hill with his tale of Ernie, the fastest milkman in the west, followed by an out-of-breath eight-year-old cavorting on Top Of The Pops as your Long Haired Lover From Liverpool. Quite how that related to a dynasty of dazzling teeth called the Osmonds from Utah in the US heaven only knows, but there you go.

And what of the bunch of kids in St Winifred’s School Choir from Stockport who sang to us that There’s No one Quite Like Grandma in 1980?

These kids were also the backing vocals behind another number one “hit”, Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs, that was the now-faded-into-obscurity (I wonder why?) duo Brian and Michael’s tribute to the artist of the factories and backstreets, LS Lowry.

Here’s one for your pub quiz though – did you know that one of the kids in that choir was a seven-year-old lass called Sally Lindsay who went on to become an actress, playing hapless Shelley Unwin in Corrie, is big mates with comedian Peter Kay and is now one of the panellists on telly’s Loose Women? And they say there’s not a lot going for Stockport….

Anyway, back to Christmas number ones…. We had the most ridiculous one ever in 1993 when pink, rotund and incredibly stupid Mr Blobby took the number one slot off Meatloaf and proceeded to become the most annoying Christmas song of all time, according to a poll by music store HMV.

The fact that a pink suit with yellow dots featuring an inane grin and jiggling eyes could knock a legitimate band known for producing pretty good stuff – well better than the Blobby rubbish anyway – says an awful lot about the psyche of us Brits.

A writer in the New York Times said Blobby was proof of Britain's deep-seated attraction to trash. Not wrong there then…

So what of this year's contenders? Will it be the Justice Collective, a bunch of artists including Robbie Williams, performing a charity song in memory of the Hillsborough disaster? Or can the Military Wives make it to the top slot for the second year in a row? Or will it be X Factor winner James Arthur, from Teesside?

But there’s a real risk that it could be the London market trader known simply as the £1 Fish Man who for reasons not all together clear became a viral sensation in the summer. As long as he doesn’t wear a Mr Blobby suit or dance around in Dave Hill’s platforms...