Telegraph’s Top 100 Christmas songs cancels the Flying Pickets Only You
Xmas No.1s have varied a bit over the decades to include some that are still remembered and played now and some that are, er, not.
The Flying Pickets version of Yazoo’s Only You was at No.1 for the whole of December 1983. Marc Burrows social history of Christmas No.1s (2025) describes the group as ‘ageing and unpretty’ which is certainly unfair on the sadly late Brian Hibbard.
The Telegraph has republished its 2022 list of the top 100 Christmas songs. John Lennon ad Yoko Ono’s Happy Christmas War is Over, which is described as ‘bittersweet’ does make it to No.81 but the Flying Pickets do not appear. Presumably the name in itself is too much for the Telegraph.
The group were actors who had come from the radical theatre group 7:84 (7% of the population own 84% of the wealth). The lead singer Brian Hibbard (the one with the sideburns) went on to a series of popular acting roles in Coronation Street and the like but sadly died in 2012. They had been active in the 1972 and 1974 miners strikes and the 1984 strike was just three months off.
The Flying Pickets were regulars on the London New Variety circuit, a weekly evening of radical music, theatre and comedy staged by CAST (the Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre, sometimes known as the Campaign Against Shakespearian Theatre) which was the brainchild of Roland and Clare Muldoon who went on to run the re-opened Hackney Empire.
A reminder of the radical 1980s, the political world which amongst other things helped to form the current and immediate past Labour leaders, although that is barely acknowledged by the current incumbent.
In 2025 the song is featuring in a Christmas TV advert..
Kmflett's Blog 
I’m pretty sure that Brian would have been delighted that 42 years after their chart success, the subversiveness of the name “Flying Pickets”, would still strike terror in the editorial offices of the Daily Telegraph.
I fondly remember their fabulous version of Talking Heads’ ‘Psychokiller’.