DanChartFan

55 years to the week between that track's second of two original weeks in the top 10 in the Xmas/NY week of 1962/3 and its return to the Top 10 in the same week in 2017/8. Hard to imagine that anything else could have beaten that.

And now it's got #37 too. That's 36 of the Top 40 positions it has visited, leaving only 15, 17, 29 and 34 unvisited by the track. I'm not sure if it can get any of those now, but never say never.

It's knocked off #36 now, so that's 35 different Top 40 positions now.

The last five charts have seen Beautiful Things chip away at the 31-40 section, achieving three of the six positions in that range that it hadn't done before. Now it only needs 15, 17, 29, 34, 36 and 37 for a complete tour of the top 40. It's consistently in the 31-40 range at the moment so it's certainly possible that it will get the lower three of those soon. All it needs is a random resurgence at some point and even the other three could end up happening.

I've also thought of Morris Minor and the Majors, Stutter Rap (3), but it's the same problem as Fresh Prince, in that the TV series Morris Minor's Marvellous Motors was built around the Morris Minor character after the single had been a hit.

Do DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince count? Summetime (8) and Boom! Shake The Room (1). The difficulty here is that their duo was formed in 1986, whilst the TV show wasn't created until 1990, but the show was built around their onstage characters and their two top ten hits were well into the show's run so most of the people buying it at the time would have perceived the singles as being by the characters from the show.

And just 3 weeks later it has pushed the record out to a Top 14 clean sweep. It only needs to hit 15, 17 and 29 at some point to more than double the record to a Top 30!

In fact Beautiful Things equals Last Christmas by actually completing a Top 11 clean sweep, with As It Was having only done a Top 10 clean sweep. Maybe next week Beautiful Things will become the first track in history to complete a clean sweep of the Top 12?

Going by the Virgin Top 40 charts books the w/e dates for December 1967 are 6th, 13th, 20th, 27th. The OCC has w/e dates of 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th as they have started each chart week on the dates that the Virgin book has ended them on, but I believe that is a known wrinkle with the 60s charts on the OCC site. There are also new charts compiled every single week in Xmas 1967 and New Year 1968, so no reason to think they might have put certain sales days into the wrong chart week. Trying to get the chart arrangement straight in my head for each Xmas/New Year from the 50s to 1983 does make my head hurt though and I may well have misunderstood something.

Literally only Saviours Day and Goodbye, unless I've overlooked something, as the others all had weeks at the top either prior to the Christmas chart, after it, or both.

Yeah certainly the 11 post-millennium ones would have been released a week later.

The chart is a weekly chart and is therefore always inherently on a delay. A chart is deemed to be 'current' in the week after the sales week that was used to compile it. Christmas number one has long been defined as the song that is number one on the chart that is 'current' on Christmas day itself. The only year where it was any different was 1988, when a new chart was due to be announced on Xmas Day itself, which happened to fall on a Sunday, and they chose to unveil it on Boxing Day Monday instead but still referred to it as the official Christmas chart. Cliff stayed put in the top spot anyway so it didn't cause any dispute as to who was rightful Christmas number one. Generally speaking until the early 80s the Christmas chart was the last one of the year, with the following sales week's chart often never being compiled at all to give the compilers a week off, and possibly also due to seasonal postal issues trying to get the record shop's weekly log books back to the compilers in time. The other thing to consider is that it was thought to be likely that the number one wouldn't change hands again until somewhere in January anyway, so it probably wouldn't affect who the rightful Christmas number one was. If we changed the definition of Xmas number one to being the biggest seller in the sales week that happened to actually include Christmas day (and as reckoned by the same chart compilers we currently use) then we'd have to changed the following Christmas number ones: 1962 - Elvis Presley would be replaced with Cliff Richard 1968 - The Scaffold would be replaced with Marmalade 1978 - Boney M would be replaced with The Village People 1988 - Cliff Richard would be replaced with Kylie and Jason 1990 - Cliff Richard would be replaced with Iron Maiden 1998 - The Spice Girls would be replaced with Chef 2009 - Rage Against The Machine would be replaced with Joe McElderry 2011 - Military Wives/Gareth Malone would be replaced with Coldplay 2012 - Justice Collective would be replaced with James Arthur 2013 - Sam Bailey would be replaced with Pharrell Williams 2014 - Ben Haenow would be replaced with Mark Ronson ft Bruno Mars 2015 - Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir replaced with Justin Bieber 2018 - LadBaby replaced with Ava Max 2019 - LadBaby replaced with Ellie Goulding 2020 - LadBaby replaced with Wham! 2021 - LadBaby ft Ed Sheeran and Elton John replaced with Ed Sheeran and Elton John 2022 - LadBaby replaced with Wham!

I agree that if anything it needs simplifying, rather than adding yet another layer of complexity. I think as the chart gets more and more complicated it gets harder and harder for the average member of the public to even understand what any of it represents, which means it gets less and less relevant to them. In my opinion the whole thing needs a rethink. I wonder if the rethink needs to come from the streaming companies end. Keep separate stats for the single version and the album track version. The album track version counts only to the album chart, the single version counts only to the singles chart. That way a new big album release won't monopolise the top 10-20 places of the singles chart, and a new popular single doesn't have to be artificially deducted after the fact from an album's streaming total. Also a catalogue track like the many Xmas songs or Mr Brightside is more likely to be on streaming as a track on a studio album or compilation album than as as a stand alone single track, so that would also temper most vintage tracks from swamping the singles chart, unless they were being actively repromoted. For current artists and songs the streaming companies algorithms could ensure that casual searchers stumble upon the single version first unless they actively search for the name of the album. And maybe let all streams count equally again, whether audio or video and whether paid or free. Maybe also turn the metric on its head and convert physical and download sales into an equivalent number of streams so that the entire metric is streams rather than sales, which would surely be more relevant to the young demographic crucial to the charts. The current teens and twenties something clearly love music as the ones I know rarely take their wireless earbuds out, yet they also have zero interest in the charts as at this stage the way it works is becoming impenetrable to people that haven't spent a decade or more in a forum like this.

I'd definitely be up for that. The song was still widely played at Xmas 20+ years ago but seems to have all but disappeared in recent years sadly. I can remember back in 2000 when I worked on a deli it was played over the shops speakers and the 6 of us serving on the counter spontaneously started marching up and down whilst we served our customers (possibly not the wisest idea in the close vicinity of mechanical ham slicers...) but I can't imagine anyone doing that nowadays and can't imagine it even gets publicly played much now.

Merry Christmas Joseph, thank you for hosting the Christmas chart show thread for the 160+ of us who were viewing it this year.