The Christmas is All Around Edition

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2018

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the UK, the No. 1 song the week of Christmas is a big deal. The media breathlessly covers the contest, and there are even wagers placed on what song will reach the top of the charts as pop stars and record labels jockey for position. While there are patterns to the kinds of songs that tend to do well in this perennial sweepstakes, often the winner is a fluke: Everything from Queen to the Flying Pickets to Bob the Builder has taken the crown. It was even parodied in the smash British Christmas comedy film Love, Actually—and one year in the late aughts, the British public rebelled en masse against a music-TV impresario, making a statement with the unlikeliest Christmas topper ever. But in an age when songs sell less than they stream, and hits tend to snowball, will the sun set on the fluky British Christmas No. 1 empire? Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.
0:27.0	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why is the Song Number One series.
0:34.3	On today's show, happy holidays from all of us at hit parade.
0:39.0	In the spirit of the season, we're going to play a bounty of Christmas hits not all of them
0:45.2	Christmas music but all of it is in a very specific way very British. You are always on my mind.
0:59.4	Confused, why am I playing this 80's synth pop song? What do the Pet Shop Boys have to do with the holiday season?
1:08.0	Well, their version of Always on My Mind reach number one in the United Kingdom in late December
1:15.5	1987, which means Pet Shop Boys Always on My Mind has gone down in the history books as part of a very specific literally provincial pop chart tradition.
1:27.0	Mary's boy child Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day. I will confess as an American follower of the pop charts every December I am deeply envious of my friends in the
1:46.1	United Kingdom because in no country in the world are the pop charts followed so avidly as they are in Great Britain.
1:55.5	This is basically true year-round.
1:58.0	The UK is a smaller country than the US, and a larger proportion of British citizens seem to feel a more proprietary ownership of their pop charts than many Americans feel about their billboard charts.
2:12.0	But at no time of year is British chart
2:15.2	following more intense than at the holidays. The Brits have even made an annual
2:21.6	national pastime out of it.
2:24.0	We are both going for the tightest spot in the world of music at Christmas number one.
2:30.0	It's war. Total war.
2:34.4	For 45 years now, all of England, I mean the whole country, not just chart-obsessed music
2:41.7	nerds like me, has made a sport of what song would top the charts the week of Christmas.
2:49.0	The competition even generates wagers with British pubs, bookies and bedding parlors.
2:55.9	It is covered in UK newspapers, on the telly and on the radio.
3:01.2	On BBC Radio 1. So then, this is where we're about to find out what's going to happen for Christmas
	...

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