The snow’s come and gone, and what a lovely gift it was… apart from all the slipping, breaking of collar bones, snail’s-pace traffic jams, and general freezing to death. But wasn’t it pretty? The answer is… no, not really. The only time snow is pretty is on Christmas Eve; unfortunately, we had the snow (and, worse, the ice) every day APART from Christmas Eve. The weather fairies, it seems, are growing increasingly incompetent. And now we’re told more of the Arctic shafting is on its way.

But Christmas 2009 was made gleeful all the same by Rage Against the Machine making Christmas No.1 – possibly the single most unlikely event since Greece robbed Luis Figo of the 2004 European Championships. It was a glorious victory for music, made all the more worthwhile just to hear the middle-aged viewers calling into GMTV and expressing their outrage at ‘poor Joe what’s-his-face’ being unfairly robbed of his No.1 spot, and having the dreary GMTV presenters look into the screen in all seriousness and ask ‘is it right?’ for this to have happened? Well, it did happen. In your face, children.

Speaking of hard rock, mystifying news has broken that Sir Christopher Lee is releasing a heavy metal album – which qualifies as the most unlikely event since Rage Against the Machine made Christmas No.1. Seriously, the prospect of hearing Dracula/Count Dooku taking lead vocals on a collection of metal numbers is a little bit fascinating, and might even eclipse some of those confusingly compelling spoken-word epics by the likes of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

The present Celebrity Big Brother, we’re told, is the final one. I’m not sure I understand why, when viewing figures are so high and there’s no shortage of third-rate celebrities apparently willing to be subjected to its manipulations. Channel 4 dropping it would make about as much sense as the BBC dropping Johnothan Ross. Oh, wait…

I’m not a supporter of reality TV in general, but Big Brother has always been the exception to me, tending to provide some genuinely interesting television. Granted, it might work out to only about ten minutes of good television for every five hours of footage; but that’s still better than anything ITV has churned out. Generally, the first week (especially the always overblown hullaballoo of the launch nights) tends to be mind-numbingly dull; but then, typically, by the second week the dynamics have become far more interesting.

We’ve had Stephanie Beecham proving that a woman in her sixties can be significantly more sexy than girls more than half her age.  We’ve had the infinitely interesting Heidi Fleiss. We’ve had Stephen Baldwin proving to be the first ever entertaining AND inoffensive Bible-basher. And we’ve got the massively overrated Vinnie Jones revealing himself to be a grim, whiney old man. Why does everyone keep pretending that Vinnie Jones is some kind of great cultural figure? He was NEVER that good a footballer, and he’s even less adept at acting (pretty much playing yourself in a few films does NOT make you Peter O’Toole).

Still, the point is this; what other show could create a televisual moment as bizzare as having one of the Baldwin brothers hold hands with Alex Andre (that’s his name, right?) and having him summon the Lord Jesus into his life? Katie Price must’ve been choking on her piles of money – the LAST person she wants showing up in her life is the Son of God.

If anything, the normal Big Brother (the one that goes on for six months at a time and is populated by desperate and slightly retarded attention-seekers from really bad night-clubs) is the one that should be axed, while the celebrity version (which, let us remember, has managed over the years to entice the likes of George Galloway, Dennis Roddman, Pete Burns, TWO Jacksons, and now an evangelising Baldwin) could continue for one month a year.

And since we’re on the subject of celebrities, how on earth did a talentless mop of blonde hair like Jessica Simpson wind up coupled with one of the greatest geniuses in rock history; aka, Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins? They’d be about as well matched as Osama bin Laden and Miss Piggy.

PS; if anyone’s thinking of stealing that idea of Bin Laden and Ms Piggy as the basis for a sitcom, back off – I’m getting it copyrighted, ASAP…