The fact that this does almost work as a pop song is probably down to the alleged involvement of Michael Jackson. December 5, and I hear my first Christmas song of the season – at least it was a decent one and not that awful Feliz Navidad or Snoopy’s Christmas! I confess, I’d forgotten about this song, until I heard it while I was out driving today—you may quite rightly ask what two-bit radio station I was listening to. It was at the Academy Awards when advertising executive Robert Opel streaked past David Niven on live TV.

It’s also probably one of the last, as they’ve become rarer and rarer since their heyday in the late fifties-early sixties.This was common in the fifties and sixties, and has become a normal occurrence again in the 21 st century, but throughout the entirety of the seventies and eighties no record managed the feat. That cheap, relentless boogie-woogie beat, and the chorus’s strong whiff of ‘The Timewarp’, does sort of hook me in.

In 1993, " Mr Blobby" became the second novelty song to reach the coveted Christmas number one slot in the UK, following Benny Hill's 1971 chart-topper " Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)". While we may not think of these tunes as the best music of the '70s, '60s or any other time period, they have hit and stayed on the charts in many instances. The original recording was denounced by the Roman Catholic Church in the US because it mixed kissing with Christmas. Other novelty songs in the '70s are Jimmy Castor Bunch "King Kong"(1975), Rick Dees' " Disco Duck" (1976) and The Fools' "Psycho Chicken" [19] (1978). Doop were, you’ll be shocked to realise, from the Netherlands, the one country that can rival masters Germany for Europop cheese.And anyway, luckily for all of us, The Outhere Brothers have an even bigger hit coming up very soon…) They were a duo from Chicago – yet another pair of fake chart-topping siblings – and this was their breakthrough hit, after previous releases such as ‘Pass the Toilet Paper’ had failed to chart. As sentimental songs were the mainstay of Tin Pan Alley, novelty and comical songs helped to break the monotony, developing in the twenties and thirties as signs of the times.