I was kind of hoping people would’ve cottoned onto this monetised anger game by now, but seemingly not. Yesterday I noticed Fairytale of New York trending on Twitter. The BBC in their wisdom had apparently banned it because it contains a couple of no longer acceptable words. Then it turned out they hadn’t. Or not quite. Only an edited version could be played on some stations. But, alas, by the time this clarification arrived, it was too late. Every nut job in the UK was on the case. About half defending the song, about half saying it was about time. The latter group were mostly glad because, quote, the lyrics might offend someone. Not them personally, obviously, but, you know, someone.

Spool forward a couple more hours and the offended-third-party warrior anger levels had reached a solid nine on the Laurence Fox Uber-Twat Psychosis Scale and #defundtheBBC was trending. These are the moments my faith in humanity’s ability to dig itself out of the myriad global problems hit tailspin levels.

Will we never learn?

Banning or editing controversial stuff always ends up having the precise opposite effect to the one intended. Just ask Tipper Gore. Founder of the PMRC movement in the 1980s. Prototype Stepford-wife soccer-mom, Tipper, found herself shocked after hearing some of the lyrics her kids were listening to. Something has to be done about this, she said, and so, being, ahem, politically well connected, to cut a long story short, she managed to force record companies to put stickers on records with potentially offensive content. Genius. What better way to make kids want to listen to something than stopping them. Banned stuff is cool when you’re fourteen. Stuff labelled ‘explicit content’ was like nectar to innocent youth. Artists that would never thought of swearing on record realised that having a PMRC sticker on their album was a great way to increase sales. In more ways than one, you could argue that Tipper Gore’s noble but ill-conceived intentions were the making of artists like Madonna, Prince and way too many way too crappy hair-metal bands. Talk about Law of Unintended Consequences.

And so here we are again. The more the PC brigade seeks to ban potentially offensive material, the more they try and re-write history, the more they force it underground, the more they make it irresistibly cool.  

Hmm. Wait a minute. Maybe that was the plan? The actual BBC plan. Now the GenXer’s are in charge of the Beeb, what better way to get back at the Establishment than to overturn one of the biggest crimes in pop-chart history? Let’s make the monetised hate work the other way around for a change. Let’s get the best and only Christmas song worth a damn to the Number One position it cruelly never achieved.

Yes. Ha. I get it now. Hash tag. I have ten copies on order.