An uphill struggle? “Yes, that’s one way of looking at it.” Displaying the laconic realism that was once the hallmark of his old band Squeeze, Chris Difford is contemplating the task that he set himself when the BBC asked him single-handedly to revive the pan-generational irony-swerving Christmas classic. Has he pulled it off?

When his choir-festooned, bells-blazing cockle-warmer Let’s Not Fight This Christmas airs on The One Show on BBC One tonight — all proceeds to Children in Need — you’ll get to judge for yourself. You would have to be “optimistic to the point of madness”, Difford acknowledges, to go into such an enterprise thinking that you might emulate deathless seasonal classics by Slade, Wizzard and the Pogues. “Not only are you fighting against the quality of those songs,” he adds, “but you’re fighting against the enostalgia people feel for those songs, not to mention The X Factor.”

It’s probably better not to think about the array of artists who have tried and failed to traverse this deceptively tricky terrain. Queen’s comically overwrought Thank God It’s Christmas was further marred by a performance in which Freddie Mercury appeared to be trying to pass a bauble. Indeed, the innate campness of the festive season means that famously camp pop stars are somehow foxed by the idea of writing a song to fit the occasion. How else do you explain Elton John’s sudden loss of form in 1973 when he delivered Step into Christmas — a tune that would struggle to make it as a jingle for Lidl turkey crowns?

“It’s harder than it sounds,” says Mike Batt, who, having reached No 2 in 1974 with A Wombling Merry Christmas, knows a thing or two about this subject. Batt says he wouldn’t even attempt to write a seasonal classic in 2008, so certain is he of being shot down in critical flames. “Back in the 1970s people were more in tune with the spirit of these songs,” he says. “Probably because of Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift to You, there was no stigma attached to Christmas records.”

The wheel may yet turn full circle. Glasvegas have already released their Christmas mini-album A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like a Kiss). “It probably won’t be like Wham!” the singer James Allan predicted while the group were still recording it. And sure enough, F*** You, It’s Over couldn’t be less like Last Christmas if Robert Mugabe were singing it. What Glasvegas’s “festive” songs do highlight, however, is that, when it comes to writing a seasonal epic, it helps to come from a less privileged background. What came so easily to Wizzard and Shane McGowan has conspicuously eluded Coldplay and Keane, neither of whom have tried to write a yuletide tune.

Indeed, the objective of writing “a working-class British Christmas song” was exactly what Noddy Holder had in mind when he returned from his local and wrote Merry Christmas Everybody. “And it fitted right with the political and social things going on at the time,” he says. “It was very grim: there was the three-day week, power cuts at 10 o’clock at night . . . [the] miners’ strike.”

If nothing else, doesn’t that at least suggest that, with Britain once again on the edge of depression, the social preconditions might be ripe for a new golden era of irony-free Christmas music?

Dan Gillespie Sells, of the Feeling, must think so. His own yuletide creation, Feels Like Christmas, has just been added to the band’s MySpace page. “After I wrote Feels Like Christmas,” he says, “it did occur to me that every great Christmas song is written in a major key, with descending major scales that remind you of church. So while there’s a triumphant bounce to the best Christmas songs, you have to have some sadness in there lyrically — because Christmas is a bittersweet time.”

He has a point. Even the most buoyant Christmas songs have the ability to make you cry — some, admittedly, with naked terror. Fourteen years after I heard Neil Diamond’s 1994 Christmas album, I still have flashbacks to his delivery of the line: “Bring me some figgy pudding”. On the other hand, watching Fran Healy, of Travis, playing Merry Christmas Everybody, there was something undeniably powerful about the way he sang the line: “Does your granny always tell you/ That the old songs are the best?”

Therein, Batt says, lies the final ingredient of the perfect Christmas record. “You build nostalgia into the song,” he explains, “so that the rush of warmth is there from the start. That’s what Shane McGowan did with Fairytale of New York, where this couple are looking back on the early days of their relationship.”

Having itemised all the constituents of the perfect Christmas record, it should surely be a cinch to come up with one now. So I attempt to use all this freshly acquired knowledge to write a seasonal smash of my own.

I can’t do it alone, though. A respected singer-songwriter friend (hence his need to stay anonymous) has generously given up a morning to lend a hand. I pick out a Christmassy hook on the piano and he finds some plangent chords which spider out from there to create verses.

It turns out that, actually, crowbarring the key elements of a Christmas song into a single composition is far from easy. My rubbish lyric about a man snowed in at Prestwick airport is fielded politely when I tell Gillespie Sells about it. “That’s pretty epic,” he says when I divulge the middle-eight “dream-sequence” in which Santa gives our protagonist a lift home. With no time to think of anything better, I now know how Björn Ulvaeus felt when he described the feeling of dread that he had on the morning he presented the rest of Abba with the words of Dum Dum Diddle.

I play the resulting demo to the TV, theatre and jingle composer Andrew Whelan, then brace myself for the worst. “Basically though, you’re barking up the right tree,” he says. But is it a hit? “Probably not. It lacks an uplifting chorus that says: ‘Like Wenceslas, I’m marching through the snow, but I’m going to get there’.” A bit depressing, then? “Just a bit. Next time, try putting a suspended fourth in there.” I assure him that I’ll do exactly that. This year may have gone. But in 2009 nothing will stop me. Once I’ve found out exactly what a suspended fourth is.

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