Free I can make you hate by Charlie Brooker Page B

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 fifteen 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 chuckling 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 atChristmas. 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 twenties 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 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. 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 balls 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.

Rage within the machine
21/12/2009
     
    At the time of writing, it’s not clear whether the 2009 Christmas No. 1 will be ‘The Climb’ by Joe McElderry, or ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage Against the Machine. I’ve just done my bit to inch the latter closer to the top spot by downloading it – something I’d resisted doing until now because I initially thought there was something a bit embarrassing about the campaign. After all, as every other internet smartarse pointed out, both tracks are owned by Sony BMG – so no matter which one sells the most, Simon Cowell wins. In other words, even by raging against the machine, you’re somehow