A White Christmas on Sky Sports is scraping the festive barrel

View from the Sofa: Sky Sports News HQ, Christmas Day coverage

Sky Sports News presenter Jim White on Christmas Day (Twitter/@JimWhite)

Kentucky Fried Chicken is a popular Christmas dinner in Japan. No, really. It has grown partly through clever marketing and also because Christmas Day is not a holiday there, so in order to minimise effort, workers buy bargain buckets and boneless feasts for their families rather than slave over an oven for a festival that, to them, is utterly foreign. And who are we to question it? After all, we don’t observe the Buddhist Obon festival each summer with any great gusto, so there’s no reason why they should bother decking the halls.

And anyway, there are segments of our society which you’d struggle to call Christmassy. Like Sky Sports News HQ. It’s hard to feel festive when you have 10 Premier League games, a cricket Test and some kind of gridiron shenanigans to preview.

Not that Jim White and Kate Abdo didn’t try to bring some joy into the prosaic world of sport on 25 December. At any chance they could get, they relayed to us images of footballers celebrating. Harry Kane, for example, announced on Instagram that he was “spending the day with the family”, with a picture of the Tottenham striker in a garish jumper.

He was out-camped by Arsenal’s German defender Per Mertesacker, who posted a video of himself apparently delivering a rendition of “Silent Night” – with lyrics that consisted mainly of “wooo la la la la”.

“You speak the lingo, how was that?” White enquired to Abdo, who is fluent in German.

“Hahaha! Erm....” she replied with a sideways glance at her presenting colleague, before turning to “David Lloyd with the latest from South Africa”.

David Haye, the boxer, brought us even further towards a Popcorn Chicken level of Christmas cheer in an interview done in his gym that morning. He gave the reason for his spending Christmas in the gym as “I just want to be the best I can be”. To punch Mark de Mori’s light out, presumably. Ding dong merrily and all that.

White repeatedly expressed his thanks that we could join them and his hope that we were “all having a fantastic day”. Cheers Jim, but given that we were watching Sky Sports News HQ when the rest of the country were gorging themselves silly and enjoying long-awaited family reunions, it would be safe to say that we’d had better Christmases.

But then a clip of people swimming at Boscombe Pier in Bournemouth flashed up. “Why are they doing that?” asked White as they went to a commercial break. To avoid the sound of a barrel being scraped? To escape the relentless feed of pre-match talking heads?

It turns out they had all opted to go for a Christmas dip to raise money. And White triumphantly roared that “over £35,000 was raised for Macmillan Cancer Support”. It had very little to do with sport. But it had a heck of a lot to do with Christmas. To put it in Japanese terms, it was a 15-piece Family Feast of a gesture.