The Ghost of Christmas Past haunts the charts this week, with classics of yesteryear from Mariah Carey, The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, Wham! and Wizzard all reminding you of happier times and, by implication, what terrible people you’ve all become.

Not that Simon Cowell gives a flying humbug; the top three albums this week account for a whopping 351,000 sales, all of which are helping to line the armpit-hugging pockets of the nation’s favourite high-trousered dark lord. The top-grossing triumvirate in question? Why it’s Leona Lewis, at number one with Spirit, Westlife (Back Home, #2) and Shayne Ward (Breathless, #3).

As an interesting aside, Lewis has raked in a staggering 918,000 album sales in only four weeks on the charts, all of which adds up to a serious threat to Amy Winehouse’s apparent shoe-in to the biggest-selling album of the year title. Wino currently stands at 1.36 million sales with Back To Black, but is fast being usurped by the X Factor winner, and could have dealt herself a fatal blow with the separate release of the deluxe edition which has sold 80,000 and resides at 32. Tense? Not even remotely.

And since we’re on the subject of albums, Beautiful South have a good old run with their Soup – Cream Of up 12 places to 17, McFly mcflap their wings and ascend 20 places to 22 with Greatest Hits, and ubiquitous fraudsters of the rock canon U2 are in at 51 with their trumped-up rehash of The Joshua Tree.

The singles charts are a Christmas slog almost entirely beneath comment save for Arctic Monkeys, in at 20 with ‘Teddy Picker’. It’s actually their lowest-charting single to date, easily outstripping ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’ whose irritating strains could be heard at number five back in July. Chalk that one up to timing.

Sliding a cursory glance down the chart’s danker recesses and a few familiar faces start to emerge; Babyshambles’ pretty atrocious 'You Talk' makes its debut at 54, and Charlie Fightstar finally vanquishes the ghost of Busted with the ‘orrible noise that is ‘Deathcar’ at 92.