If there’s one thing worse than medical science helping useless old people live longer, it’s breakthroughs that eradicate funny disabilities. I have no doubt this already has the autistic Left reaching for its venom pen, but a hospital team in the UK has cured a woman’s Tourette syndrome entirely. No longer can we tell harmless jokes about mute Tourettes syndrome, and F**kwit the Tourettes Signwriter: within 30 years, nobody will get the gag. I have always said that the aim of most doctors is to make Britain a more miserable place, and bankrupt the NHS. All the telltale signs are there.

Anyway – it’s Christmas, Eve. There ought to be a Christmas Eve figure: 36-24-36, as we used to say when I was pubescent. A more adult version of Santa, for those without Tourette syndrome, but replete with lustful thoughts. There ought to be, but there isn’t – 86.3M Google results had not, by Page 7, come up with it, so I gave up after that. But I do have a camera (they’re always useful for blackmail purposes at Christmas) and it says Lens error all the time. I don’t know anyone called Len. But I do know of a lady called Jan Dalley who writes in the FT. She never writes anything of any consequence, but today she has written, “2011 has been a spectacular year for female pop singers”. Try telling that to Amy Winehouse.

  Perhaps the worst thing about Christmas is Panto, and probably the worst thing about X-Factor is that is gave us Jedward. The unfortunate parents of Dublin are being treated to both together at the Olympia Theatre there during the holiday season, in a show called Jedward & The Beanstalk.

Shane Hegarty writes in the Irish Times, “They dance in their energetic, appealingly inexpert way, deliver their lines with a certain looseness, shout a few spontaneous lines when they shouldn’t, wave at the audience, and sing Lipstick until it’s the only thing your brain has room for.” This is the best of the reviews.

I didn’t realise until earlier this week just how monumentally thick these two chaps are, but I saw them on a celebrity quiz show. It was embarrassing. They literally don’t know anything.

‘Illegal immigrant who hacked off neighbour’s head with meat cleaver has his sentence CUT by six years’ claimed the Mail this morning. I thought it a classic Dacre story in that all the key elements are there: foreign persons who shouldn’t be here, daft judges, Islam, violent death, and the lack of a death penalty for monsters. In fact, the bloke – an Algerian – is a paranoid schizophrenic, a small point the prosecution failed to tell the defence at his trial. He isn’t the sharpest card in the pack either: his idea of cunning was to stick the head in a paper bag and then catch a bus to the Serpentine so he could chuck it in. Without attracting attention. He was arrested on the bus.

So really, the Mail’s headline should’ve read, ‘Braindead Bonkers illegal immigrant who hacked off neighbour’s head with meat cleaver has his sentence CUT by six years’. Just thought we should set the record straight about that one.

Christmas starts here for The Slog. Have a good one, and may your dog go with you.