Gennaro Castaldo Watch: It's Christmas

Poor Gennaro Castaldo - not only is HMV increasingly deciding to shift its business from making losses on CDs to making losses on computer games meaning he's going to have to struggle with the Wii versus PS3 battles, but his area of expertise isn't as simple as it used to be. Ireland Online asks him for a comment on the possibility that Fairytale of New York could be the Christmas number one. Because there's, you know, a Facebook campaign to make it happen.

What's Gennaro going to say? There's about sixteen thousand bloody online campaigns to get different songs to number one next Sunday. How the hell is he meant to predict which will win, or if they'll all cancel themselves out and wind up letting Leon X Factor winner bloke through? It's all on download sales, isn't it? He's not got a bloody batphone through to Apple to find out what's selling. He can only ring up HMV shops to find out what's selling, but the bloody X Factor single hasn't even been released yet, has it?

Wearily, he mumbles:

HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo said: "It might well be close this Christmas. A lot of people are downloading old favourites for their Christmas parties.

"If the campaigning takes off Kirsty MacColl could be number one. 'Fairytale of New York' never made it the first time, so it would be amazing if it could do it 20 years on."

Leave the man alone. He doesn't know. Stop poking him, making him dance to your "fill a few columns with a bit about the Christmas number one" desires, people.