The votes are in: Your top films and songs for Christmas
The votes have been totted up, and now we can reveal the Black Country's favourite festive film and song.
In the film category, it was a very hard-fought and close contest, with just a few votes separating the top five.
The classic older films didn't fare too well, but the exception was the evergreen James Stewart classic It's A Wonderful Life. Frank Capra's tale of a man's simple goodness celebrated as Christmas approaches bagged 10 per cent of the vote. It was joined on 10 per cent by Die Hard and Die Hard 2. That threesome have a share of fourth place.
It's maybe a little surprising to see The Grinch in third – Jim Carrey's high-octane mugging is not necessarily to everyone's tastes – but it ran up 11 per cent of the votes and can feel very pleased with itself. Not as pleased, though, as Macaulay Culkin, whose starring role in Home Alone saw him inching ahead of The Grinch into the second-placed slot with 12 per cent.
And so we come to the winner. It's likely that this may come as a surprise to some of our older readers, who may not even know about the film's existence, but a new generation of movie-goers took this film into their hearts and made it into one of the cult sleeper hits of the last decade. It's story of a man raised to believe he is an elf, making his way in an unfamiliar world and getting by on the simple goodness of his heart. We're talking, of course, about Elf, the exuberantly daft vehicle for Will Ferrell's talents with a great big happy Christmas ending to warm the cockles of the heart. It garnered 14 per cent of the votes polled, but in a very open competition that was enough for it to be, officially, crowned the Black Country's favourite Christmas film.
So yes, a very open race.
But it was one-horse affair from the word go in the song vote, with one act romping miles away from the second-placed artistes. Band Aid shared the fourth slot. Seven per cent of you thought it was the quintessential Christmas hit. Alongside it was an all-time feelgood classic, Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song, with its chestnuts roasting and Jack Frost nipping at noses.
The Pogues' Fairytale Of New York, a classic singalong that earned nine per cent of the vote. Alongside it is a rather more conventionally jolly number, Wizzard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day, which is a noble if rather unlikely message.
It was always going to be tough for anyone to get past Slade. We all know that the band, and especially Noddy Holder, are Black Country legends, but even we weren't ready for their storming performance. Merry Christmas Everybody raked in an eye-popping 56 per cent of the vote. We hereby declare them makers of the most bostin' Christmas record ever!
TOP FIVE FILMS
1. Elf
2. Home Alone
3. The Grinch
4. Die Hard 1 & 2
=4. It's A Wonderful life
TOP FIVE SONGS
1. Merry Christmas Everybody
2. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day
=2. Fairytale Of New York
4. The Christmas Song
=4. Do They Know It's Christmas?
Slade - However much you happen to love Christmas, it's probably fair to say that Noddy Holder and chums probably love it more. They could have only ever released this one single and it would have seen them set for life – a recent report revealed that Merry Christmas Everybody brings in over half a million pounds a year in royalties for the band, which is quite remarkable given that it can only expect to be played in December.
When first released in 1973, it sold over a million copies, and overcame the other major glam song of the era, Wizzard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day, in much the same way that it has won this poll. It continues to chart every Christmas.
In 2009 the Performers' Rights Society for Music estimated that as much as 42 per cent of the planet's population could have heard the song, which is not bad considering it was assembled from melodies that the band had previously discarded.
Interestingly, despite striking gold with this song, it was to be Slade's last number one. But then they didn't really need any more...
Elf - Whenever Elf is on UK TV – and it is on a lot – Twitter goes into meltdown as people tweet quotes at each other. It seems to have slowly but surely become the film that unites people. There are apparently no people who don't love it.
It was pretty much the film that Will Ferrell was born to play, allowing him to give full reign to his goofy and childish persona as the man-child who grew up raised as an elf after crawling into Santa's sack as an infant and ending up in Lapland.
It's interesting to note that one of the other films on our list of nominations, Love Actually, kept Elf from taking the top spot in the UK box office charts. The punchline to this is that Love Actually got one per cent of the vote in our poll. It's the heartwarming Elf that has the power to really win over the cynics, it seems.
There's now a Broadway musical version of the film that has also become a hit, but it's the film that has the real goofy charm, and it's the film that now takes its place as the number one cracker in the Black Country. Good work Buddy.
