Well, this won’t take long.

This may be the chart for the week leading up to Christmas, but traditionally the UK only cares what’s number one on Christmas Day – in other words, last week’s number one.  That was “When Worlds Collide” by Matt Cardle, the 2010 X Factor winner, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, it’s still there this week.  It helps, of course, that virtually nobody else releases singles at this time of year, aside from a handful of people trying to sneak a hit in the dead period.

The only serious new release this week is “Lights On” by Katy B featuring Ms Dynamite, entering at number 4.

This is Katy B’s third hit of the year, following “Katy On A Mission” (number 5 in September) and her guest appearance on Magnetic Man’s “Perfect Stranger” (number 16 in October).   That’s a pretty consistent level of quality over her singles to date.

She’s a dubstep singer from London, who’s thus far done a decent job of balancing mainstream success with music that has some sort of credible club roots – perhaps surprisingly, given that she went to stage school.  But bearing in mind that a lot of pop/dance crossover acts these days are just jettisoning any pretence of credibility, Katy B’s singles so far have taken the road less travelled and tried to bridge the gap for real.

This is a collaboration with Ms Dynamite, the great British R&B hope of, er, 2002.  This is her seventh hit, but four of them came out in 2001-2, since when she hasn’t made the top 20.  She started out in London pirate radio and made her breakthrough as a guest vocalist on the garage crossover hit “Booo” by Sticky (number 12 in 2001).   If you’re wondering about the accent, she’s from London, but her father was Jamaican.  Mind you, as I recall, London rappers were quite keen on putting on Jamaican accents in those days.

Anyway, that led to a well-received debut album, “A Little Deeper”, which repositioned her as a sort of socially conscious pop-crossover act.  Her biggest and best-remembered hit would be the number 5 single “Dy-Na-Mi-Tee” .

After that, her career kind of went off the rails.  The follow-up album didn’t come out for another three years (partly because she took time off to have a child), the reviews weren’t particularly great, and promotion ground to a halt after she was arrested following nightclub brawl where she hit a police officer.  And then she kind of vanished, surfacing occasionally on reality shows that really needed somebody to make up the numbers.  She’s supposedly got a third album in the pipeline, but she’s been saying that since 2009.  That said, she does seem to be cropping up again more often – she was on January’s number 38 hit “Wile Out” by DJ Zinc, and she appears on a Magnetic Man album track – so there’s signs of life in that career yet.

There are only two other new entries on this week’s chart.  Number 26 is “The Flood” by Cheryl Cole, the second single from her current album.  It isn’t officially released until January, so this is a case of early promotion sparking downloads of the album track.  And no, it’s not a cover version of the Take That song from a couple of months ago.  It is, instead, a particularly tortuous example of taking a fairly straightforward metaphor (our love is like water, it slips through my hands…) and straining it to breaking point and beyond.  The plaintive lyric “You can’t hold on to water / It fills you up but never stays” conjures up all sort of bafflingly inappropriate imagery.

The other is at number 36: “Lonely Sky” by Ben & Jamie Hazelby featuring Chris de Burgh.  This is a charity single promoted on Sky TV, raising money for a day care centre in Cheadle.  It had something of a surge of sales at the start of the week on the back of its TV exposure, before tailing off.  “Lonely Sky” is a relatively obscure Chris de Burgh song from his 1975 album “Spanish Train and Other Stories”.  It was apparently the favourite song of the Hazelby brothers’ late mother, and de Burgh has been enlisted to sing a few lines on this version.

De Burgh has always been more of an albums act and, perhaps surprisingly, this is only his seventh top 40 hit.  The other six were “The Lady In Red” (number 1 in 1986), “A Spaceman Came Travelling”/“The Ballroom of Romance” (number 40 in 1986, though that didn’t stop the former track being played to death on radio for years afterwards), “Missing You” (number 3 in 1988), “The Simple Truth (A Child Is Born)” (number 36 on its 1991 re-release), “Separate Tables” (number 30 in 1992), and “So Beautiful” (number 29 in 1997).

Most of those links are fan videos, by the way – Chris de Burgh videos seem to be thin on the ground on YouTube, or indeed just plain non-existent in the first place.  But don’t feel bad for him – aside from his rather better strike rate in albums sales, Wikipedia informs me that he has also been a regular guest on the Lebanese version of Fame Academy.

Finally, because some of last week’s singles tailed off in sales, there are a few re-entries at the lower end of the chart: “Written in the Stars” by Tinie Tempah featuring Eric Turner at number 35, “Promise This” by Cheryl Cole at number 38, and “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz” at number 39.