Even in this ever-shrinking world in which we live in non-Brits may not know about the Cheeky Girls phenomenon. They are two bony sisters from Transylvania who have finagled a comedy appearance on a reality pop show into becoming something close to a national institution. Their schtick is simple, odd, and clever all at once. Initially famous for a song which went ‘Touch my bum’ they now produce regular singles which are played on horribly cheap sounding keyboards and sung in comedy Euro-accents. That’s the simple bit. The odd bit is that people refuse to tire of them and the clever bit is that they only seem to release records when some kind of national mood is there for the exploiting. Their last single was ‘Hooray Hooray It’s A Cheeky Holiday’ and now we have this. Only cruel scheduling has prevented us from hearing ‘Cheeky Drop Kick’.
The Cheeky Girls are entirely harmless of course and in its clodhopping, thumping way this record is one of the more charming festive releases. It gets the basics right anyhow — sleigh bells and jollity abound. The Cheekies sing about fun on a ‘hot hot Christmas night’ — part of their ‘thing’ is that they are comedy nymphos — and the three minutes pass fairly quickly. I find it terribly difficult to imagine anyone making the effort to hate this but I also was finding it hard to imagine anyone spending money on it, and then I realised: the sales figures of ‘Have A Cheeky Christmas’ will be an exact reflection of the number of office round robins taking place in Britain this year.