This Queens Park Rangers Festive Song Will Make You Re-Think Christmas Cheer

You can already picture the scene at QPR football club when the players were told they would be dancing along to a Christmas song for their club’s YouTube channel, as the manager slowly explains that taking part is compulsory, because it’s come from “quite high up”, when in reality he just doesn't have the energy to argue with the club's social media guru who suggested it, not least because their other idea was getting the players to do Tumblr reaction posts to that day's Newsnight.

Often, when someone comes up with wincing ideas like this, there are three ways people react:

A) They outright refuse to engage with it.
B) They play along, but with a massively exaggerated air of detachment to make it abundantly clear they do not support it, like doing "Big Fish, Little Fish, Cardboard Box" at a nightclub.
C) They wholeheartedly embrace it because IT'S JUST A BIT OF FUN.

And judging from this arid and surreal festive cover of Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody”, it seems QPR football club is mostly full of Bs and Cs.

I, and the QPR YouTube channel, use "cover" in the loosest sense of the word. Where football pop songs usually consist of uplifting 80s pop fodder led by the only two lads posh enough to have attended choir practice, so that the rest of the team can just fill in with haunting crowd chants, this lot just chose to mime along to the original, which makes for a strangely nonsensical experience that begins to resemble some sort of social experiment art project on how different people react to aural exposure to Slade in a Christmas-themed solitary confinement.

The players themselves tackle it with mixed enthusiasm. There are the ones who bowl in with a rampant level of cringeworthy theatrics, based on memories from the last time they watched VH1 with a bottle of Pinot.

Clint Hill, below, is so passionate about it all, he’s belts it out deadpan like he’s alone in his living room singing the national anthem at the wireless after the announcement of World War 2.

Shaun Wright Phillips seems to be struggling to get into the first team at the minute. Perhaps harbouring some sort of delusion that "the gaffer" will announce one afternoon in the changing rooms, “Right Shaun, as a repayment for your eagerness to wear the fake Santa beard, you’ll be starting on up front against Burnley this Saturday. Everyone else, take a leaf from Shaun’s book.”

I have no idea who these two kids are, and I don't think they know themselves.

Eventually, there are a few category Bs, the ones who die inside with every mimed line, and will find it hard to masturbate or look in the mirror for the 2-3 days that this video inevitably goes mildly viral.

And then there is the gaffer, Harry Redknapp; the old-timer at the end, known as football's biggest wheeler-dealer, but starring here as John Carpenter's The Thing.

Like some sort of accidental Herzog, QPR have kinda hit the nail on the head with this: an eerily awkward piece that perfectly reflects the forced happiness and subtle humiliation that, let's face it, underpins all of Christmas culture.