Charlie Brooker's piece:
Like a giant black velvet cat whose tusk-white incisors glint malevolently in the darkness as it slinks noiselessly towards its prey, the end of the year is almost upon us. Eager to get things over with, Christmas has faded in extra early this year. Everywhere you look it's yuletide this and festive that. Each shop window sports a snowman; each street lamp a coil of winking fairylights. I had a piss the other day and a load of tinsel came out. Yippee for Christmas.
Christmas, of course, has its very own "face of the channel": Santa Claus, although he doesn't appear in adverts as often as he used to. For the past few years Coca-Cola has been aggressively pushing Santa as some kind of God of its own making, so it's hardly surprising that in other ads, for other products, he's been usurped by celebrity cameos, or in Iceland's case, Jason Donovan and a Nolan.
He doesn't show up in films so much these days, either. It's been 15 years since the last remake of Miracle On 34th Street, and almost a quarter of a century since Santa Claus The Movie. Part of the problem is that you can't really do much with Santa himself. He's not a cop on the edge trying to outrun his own demons. He's a laughing fat man. In character terms, Santa is bollocks.
If you really want to see Santa on screen in the run-up to 25 December, your best bet is to tune in to Santavision (Sky Channel 200), where he's preparing for the yuletide season by sitting in an unconvincing living room mercilessly wringing money from as many people as possible with an interactive text-to-TV dedication scheme. Merry Christmas!
The idea is simple: you text him the name of your kiddywink, accompanied by the words "NAUGHTY" or "NICE", and Santa duly enters them on to his "Naughty" or "Nice" list, scrolling up the right-hand side of the screen. He'll also say their name aloud, usually as part of a sparkling ad-lib such as, "Ho, ho, ho! I see GREGORY has been a naughty boy! Naughty GREGORY." This bespoke improvisation costs £1.50 a pop and, as the website is keen to point out, you're not allowed to include the names of more than one child per text, which seems a tad unsporting, since the largest families are often the ones most financially stretched at Christmas. It's almost as if, contrary to everything we've been led to believe, Santa doesn't give a shit about kids after all.
Perhaps that's why he's lost weight. Apparently these days Santa looks like a skinny bloke in his 20s in a cheap beard, sweating his way through what amounts to a televised prison sentence. Sometimes he switches his microphone off and holds lengthy mysterious conversations with someone on the end of a phone, live on air. Possibly his lawyer.
At least you can keep his spirits up by sending in inappropriate names. I fearlessly borrowed someone's phone and used it to trick Santa into admonishing the serial murderer Dennis Nilsen for being a naughty boy. He also read out a follow-up name – the rather puerile "Carmen Mite-Hitz" – but sadly blew it by mispronouncing the forename as "Cameron". A subsequent attempt to get him to read out the name "Ivana Fahkz-Humbaddi" failed completely; they wouldn't even add it to the list, the cowards. If you fancy a laugh and don't mind pissing money up the wall like a champagne socialist, you could do worse than spend this afternoon texting in innocent-looking but obscene-sounding names for Santa to babble at his audience of oblivious children.
Currently, Santavision only runs from 4pm to 7pm. In an ideal world it'd come back on air at closing time, with an "Adult Santavision" service modelled on Babestation and the like, in which nihilistic drunks text in increasingly demeaning physical commands for him to obey, such as stuffing his goods into a stocking or coming down the chimney. Or let's dispense with the wordplay entirely and just make him roll around on the floor, clapping and farting until Christmas at £1.50 per emission. The perfect metaphor for the entire season
