Every December, the United Kingdom stages a pop ritual with no real equivalent anywhere else: the race for the Christmas number one. The prize is nothing more than the top of the singles chart dated over Christmas week, yet the contest has generated seven decades of campaigns, rivalries and genuine national conversation. The tradition is as old as the chart itself. The New Musical Express published the first UK singles chart in November 1952, and that December Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart” became the first festive chart-topper, more or less by default.
The Beatles set the standard
The contest acquired its competitive edge in the 1960s, when the Beatles took the Christmas top spot four times, in 1963, 1964, 1965 and again in 1967, a haul no act has matched. The Spice Girls came closest to their consecutive run, landing three in a row from 1996 to 1998 with “2 Become 1”, “Too Much” and “Goodbye”. The defining head-to-head battle, though, belongs to 1973, when Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” held off Wizzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”. Slade sold a million copies and secured a royalty stream that returns every December; Wizzard earned the consolation of near-equal airplay ever since. Queen managed the rare feat of taking the title twice with the same song, as “Bohemian Rhapsody” topped the Christmas chart in 1975 and again in 1991 following Freddie Mercury’s death.
Charity records and novelty heartbreak
In 1984, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” became the fastest-selling single in UK history to that point, moving over three million copies and holding Wham!’s “Last Christmas” at number two. The following decade showed how strange the race could get: Mr Blobby, a pink-and-yellow children’s television character, took the 1993 title, while in 1994 East 17’s “Stay Another Day” beat Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”, denying the modern era’s definitive Christmas song the crown at the first attempt.
The X Factor years and the revolt
From 2005 the race appeared settled in advance. Winners of ITV’s talent show The X Factor took four consecutive Christmas number ones: Shayne Ward in 2005, Leona Lewis in 2006, Leon Jackson in 2007 and Alexandra Burke in 2008, whose cover of “Hallelujah” sold more than half a million copies in a week. The predictability bred rebellion. In December 2009, a Facebook campaign started by Jon and Tracy Morter propelled Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 track “Killing in the Name” past X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s “The Climb” by roughly 50,000 sales, a protest vote that remains the race’s most famous upset.
LadBaby and the streaming age
Once streaming was folded into the UK chart in 2014, sustained plays began to count alongside sales, changing the arithmetic of a one-week sprint. The era’s unlikely dominant force was LadBaby, the online persona of Mark Hoyle, whose novelty singles in aid of the food-bank charity The Trussell Trust took five consecutive Christmas number ones from 2018 to 2022, beginning with “We Built This City” reworked around sausage rolls and later drafting in Ed Sheeran and Elton John. The streak surpassed the consecutive records of both the Beatles and the Spice Girls. Then, in 2023, sentiment finally caught up with history: Wham!’s “Last Christmas” reached Christmas number one 39 years after losing to Band Aid, powered almost entirely by streaming, and George Michael’s estate marked a victory the song’s co-writer never saw.
A race made for a wager
Part of what keeps the tradition alive is that it behaves like a sporting event. Bookmakers have priced the Christmas number one for decades, making it one of the oldest and most popular novelty markets in British entertainment betting, with odds that swing on campaign launches, charity singles and viral momentum through December. The chart itself matters less commercially than it once did, but the race endures precisely because it is a contest: a national argument, renewed annually, about which song deserves to soundtrack the last week of the year.