Bostin' Christmas record celebrates Fairytale in the Black Country
We've all done it. You go into Lidl for a cheap Christmas turkey, and come back with a breadmaker and an angle grinder instead.
And the temptation to forsake traditional Christmas festivities in favour of discount power tools at budget supermarkets is now featured in a Christmas song, with a very Black Country twist.
Tom Greenhalgh, or 'Tom from West Brom' as he is known to fans, has rewritten the lyrics to The Pogues' classic Christmas hit Fairytale in New York, only from a Black Country perspective.
By day a furnace man at J B & S Lees in West Bromwich, Tom has made a name for himself as a comedy musician, producing light-hearted songs featuring Black Country humour.
Listen to The Fairytale of the Black Country
And he says the video of his Christmas Song, Fairytale of the Black Country, has been viewed more than 160,000 times after being posted on Facebook and YouTube.
The video was filmed in a couple of hours, at the bandstand in Dartmouth Park and the canal opposite his workplace, and Tom says the whole thing was put together in less than a day.
As well as the lure of the hardware shelves at Lidl, Tom's Black Country take on the Christmas dream also tackles the issues such as how pubs charge their regulars an admission fee on New Year's Eve, the price of beer at Birmingham's German market, and why Brummies have dodgy tattoos.
Tom, 39, from the Greets Green area of West Bromwich, says: "I've been making humorous songs about the Black Country for about three or four years, we've had a good response on the internet and we had put together a CD.
"I thought this year we had got to do a Christmas song to lift people's spirits, with all that's been going on. I was expecting it to get slated, but the reaction has been brilliant, we've had a great response.
"Most of it is observational humour, and things I have experienced."
