Baby it’s getting even colder outside for Christmas songs!

It’s supposed to be the season to be jolly, but it doesn’t seem like that as far as Christmas songs are concerned.

A few days ago, we reported that a radio station in Cleveland, Ohio has taken “Baby it’s Cold Outside” off its playlist because of a possibly manipulative lyric. Well, it now appears that the trend is spreading as more stations across the US remove the offending song from their “sleigh list” of seasonal tunes.

Colorado’s KOSI 101.1 and San Francisco’s 96.5 KOIT are among stations pulling the song and running online polls to ask their listeners if it should be reinstated or not. Perhaps it might be cynical to suggest this is a great way to get good PR and listener interaction for a radio station.

To be fair, KOSI 101.1 did add the song back onto the playlist after their poll received 15,000 responses, of which 95% said that it should be played.

As for Cleveland’s Star 102, who appear to have started this all off, their poll received nearly 10,000 responses with 94% in favour of continuing to play the song. We’re not sure if it’s been reinstated because we did contact the station to ask them but didn’t receive a reply.

Meanwhile, closer to home “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl is back on the “it should be banned” list. The song contains the words “slut” and “f****t” which caused Radio 1 to censor them as far back as 2007.

Now, a student journalist, Tom Haynes has called for the song to be removed from Youtube because it’s a “homophobic slur”.

Shane MacGowan has made a statement to Virgin Media Television’s The Tonight Show about the song, saying that he’s “absolutely fine”with the word being bleeped out when it’s played on the radio.

He said: “The word was used by the character because it fitted with the way she would speak and with her character.

“She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person. She is a woman of a certain generation at a certain time in history and she is down on her luck and desperate.

“If people don’t understand that I was trying to accurately portray the character as authentically as possible then I am absolutely fine with them bleeping the word, but I don’t want to get into an argument.”

Perhaps some radio stations will come up with the idea of holding an online listener poll to see how much response they get!