Peter Kay tops the singles chart with his Children In Need medley while Susan Boyle thrashes a sales record with a number one album.

New number ones at the top of both charts this week in a big week for Susan Boyle.

For the first time for ages, the top two singles are faring a good deal less well in the downloads charts and are, therefore, at the top due largely to physical sales. After six long weeks X-Factor’s stranglehold on the top of the singles chart has been broken as the chart-topper is a song which hasn’t been performed on the show. Technically this counts as Peter Kay’s second number one although, of course, he didn’t actually perform on Amarillo.

The highest new entry, at number six, comes from Rihanna with Russian Roulette. It’s slower than normal for her but still not a bad song.

Britain’s Got Talent does, of course, come from the people who gave us X-Factor. The difference is that BGT gives acts more of a chance to play to their strengths. While I wouldn’t normally take much notice of dance acts, I cannot deny that Diversity were worthy winners. And that brings us to the runner-up, Susan Boyle. You don’t need to be too cynical to suggest that her audition was at least partially staged. The judges had clearly been encouraged to treat her with derision before hearing her sing. Notwithstanding that, she does have a great voice. She shows - and some people seem to have been surprised - that just because a woman is well into her forties and doesn’t look glamorous doesn’t mean she can’t sing. Her version of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses is a new entry at number nine. The Stones’ original has been rereleased but hasn’t troubled the top 40 compilers. Boyle has a second new entry at 37 with I Dreamed A Dream, the song she first performed on BGT.

Foreigner had a UK number one single in January 1985 with I Want To Know What Love Is. Indeed, it was the song which knocked the original Band Aid single off the top. Now Mariah Carey has taken a stereotypical American soft-rock song and turned it into a stereotypical Mariah dreary power-ballad which charts this week at number 19. Apart from the annual reappearance of All I Want For Christmas Is You, this is her first top 40 entry since last July with Bye Bye which doesn’t seem to have been a promise.

Lady GaGa gave Beyoncé a call and the result is the song Telephone which is a new entry at number 30. By the GaGa’s standards, this is not as good as Paparazzi, Poker Face or Bad Romance but is a good deal better than Just Dance and Lovegame. Chipmunk fell just short of the top 40 last week with Look For Me featuring Talay Riley whoever (s)he might be but this week he climbs eight places to enter at number 36.

A number of songs from the latest Now compilation have climbed back up the chart.. David Guetta is back up one place to number 35, Taio Cruz also goes up one to number 32, Pixie Lott is up four to 16 and Michale Buble climbs nine to 15. I can only assume that some people buy most of their singles from these compilations. If they are not included, they won’t bother looking for the song elsewhere.

For many months the assumption has been that Susan Boyle would go straight to number one with her debut album and that is, indeed, exactly what has happened. I Dreamed A Dream had already broken the record on Amazon for sales of an album before release. It is being reported that the album sold comfortably more than 400,000 thus shattering the record set by Leona Lewis for first week sales of a debut album. Last week’s number two from JLS stays put, Black Eyed Peas climb two to match their peak of number three and Queen are still at number four which means Leona Lewis, perhaps surprisingly, drops a full four places to number five with Echo.

Technically, The Fame Monster counts as a re-entry at number seven for Lady GaGa as it is the original album plus an extra CD with eight new tracks. This practice of releasing new versions of albums is becoming increasingly common. Surely it cannot be long before music buyers either ignore the initial release and wait for the de-luxe version or just download the extra tracks. The music industry has always had something to moan about; their current beef is about illegal downloading and file-sharing. However, this sort of exploitation can only diminish any sympathy people might have.

In one of his attempts to succeed in the US, Robbie Williams released The Ego Has Landed, a compilation of tracks from his first two UK albums. This week a far larger ego has landed in the albums chart in the generously proportioned shape of Chris Moyles. His Parody Album (which has cover art resembling Take That’s The Circus album cover) has entered at number 17 Could this achieve the seemingly impossible feat of inflating his ego even further?

Santa is starting to get busy buying presents for parents. The Priests duly enter at number 18 with Harmony, the follow-up to their eponymous debut which reached the top ten this time last year and became the fastest selling classical debut album of all time. It is a collection of early sacred works, some modern hymns and You’ll Never Walk Alone. Santa has also been buying Voices From The Valley - Memory Lane by Fron Male Voice Choir. This is their fourth album, all of which have contained the phrase Voices From The Valley, just in case you were wondering which part of the UK they hail from. It includes two songs generally associated with Vera Lynn, White Cliffs of Dover and We’ll Meet Again with the latter track including her original vocal recorded when she was 22 (I nearly broke into a Lily Allen song there). The album is a new entry this week at number 31. Meanwhile, Vera Lynn’s Best Of drops out of the top 40 after 18 weeks.

Last week there were a number of artists whose new albums seriously under-performed compared with previous releases. That trend continues this week as Rihanna follows three top five albums (the Reloaded version of Good Girl Gone Bad counted as a separate release under the rules in place at the time) with Rated R entering at a relatively lowly number 16. Mariah Carey has also reached the top ten with most of her studio albums but, for now at least, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel can only reach number 23. The album contains five different versions of a song called Obsessed. Well, you said it.

Four new Greatest Hits collections enter the top 40 this week, two of which have done less well than might have been expected. First, Janet Jackson tries to put her wardrobe malfunction days behind her and remind people that she has had a musical career. The Best is at number 28 this week. Perhaps the bigger shock though is the failure of Britney Spears’ Singles Collection to get any higher than number 38 although some of us would consider even that to be far too high. UB40 have released three separate collections called Labour Of Love as well as packaging the first two and then all three together as additional releases. Now, as with Queen last week, they have released a new album combining the best of all three under the unimaginative title of Best Of Labour Of Love and it enters at number 30 well below the top ten positions achieved by the separate releases. Eithne ni Bhraonian, known simply as Enya for the benefit of those of us who are not Irish, has a Very Best Of collection at number 32.