Christmas singles flood UK top 40 chart

It's beginning to sound a lot like Christmas, with festive singles accounting for more than half of this week's UK top 40 chart.

Twenty-one seasonal songs appear in the latest rundown, led by Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You.

Mariah is at number two, kept off the top spot by Ariana Grande's Positions.

Martin Talbot, head of the Official Charts Company, said it was "very unusual" to see such a "surge of interest" in festive tunes.

The appetite for Christmas music "essentially started in November", Talbot said, with people throwing themselves into "familiar TV, film, books and music as comfort from the miserable tone of so much of this year's news".

Wham's Last Christmas and Fairytale of New York by The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl have both gone back into the top 10 this week.