If you’re in Aberdeen, go and see pleasantly timewarped psych-poppers Temples at The Lemon Tree.

If you’re in Dublin, go and see acoustic moper extraordinaire Sun Kil Moon at the Button Factory.

If you’re in Nottingham, go and see grouchy rap vets Method Man, Redman and MOP at Rock City.

And if you’re fed up with bands who are too cool to get Christmassy, you could go and see Roy “I Wish It Would Be Christmas Every Day” Wood at Birmingham Symphony Hall.

Comedy-wise, Mark Thomas’s tale of corporate treachery Cuckooed can be caught at the Tricycle Theatre in London.

St Vincent, Black Sea and The Grandmaster are this week’s cinematic highlights.

Meanwhile, it’s slim pickings on the telly: there’s My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas, Missing, The Secrets Of Quantum Physics and not much in between.

That’s it from me for today, I’ll see you again sometime in the future (or past...)

From the label that brought you Adele and FKA Twigs, Southport newcomer Låpsley Fletcher comes over like a cross between, um, Adele and FKA Twigs. Nice song, clever video, could do with a touch more weirdness myself.

Joey Bada$$ is a 90s hip-hop throwback, to the point of adding a horribly wooden fake news report skit to the beginning of his new video. The song’s great though, so just forward straight to 1.44 to avoid embarrassment.

Some more riot footage here, this time chopped and screwed into a nightmarish, over-saturated audio-village collage by a chap with the very silly name of J£sus Million. It’s probably his way of saying we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.

And you can’t argue with this: Carl Craig’s driving new remix of Caribou’s crepuscular album closer Your Love Will Set You Free.

Boo! Toast Of London has finished. Hurrah! It’s just been recommissioned for a third series of high-winds acting, fastidious pronunciation and people called things like Suki Houseboat and Max Gland. Matt Berry will probably have to start re-cultivating that tache about now, because they’re going to film in June, with an air-date of next autumn.

Catch up with last night’s Josh Homme-starring episode here. Although consensus suggests the one where Toast joins the masons was the best of the series:

More 2015 TV news: following The Great British Bake Off and the incrementally more boring The Great British Sewing Bee, the BBC is currently recruiting “enthusiastic potters and ceramicists” for a show called Britain’s Best Potter. Sounds like something Toast would be forced to appear on to boost his profile. What next? Britain’s Best Whittler? The Great British Stamp Collecting Challenge?

Well, that’s our fun over for another year. There I was about to head down the bookies to stick a tenner on To Me, To You Bruv by Tinchy Stryder and The Chuckle Brothers (with a hedge bet on whatever mawkish chorus Gareth Malone has cobbled together this year) when I heard that the race for Christmas No 1 was already over.

Ladbrokes have stopped taking bets on Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk grabbing the Xmas top spot, after the record company pushed its release forward following Fleur East’s bravura performance of the song on The X Factor this weekend (which itself went straight to the top of the iTunes chart yesterday).

What an anti-climax. No sleigh bells, no fake snow, not even two moustachioed children’s entertainers and a diminutive grime rapper passing a stepladder around on a suburban cul-de-sac. Instead, we’ve got Bruno Mars strutting around in a pink blazer with a bunch of goons who I’ve just learned call themselves The Smeezingtons. Merry bleedin’ Christmas.

Suddenly prolific director Terrence Malick has two films on the slate for next year: Knight Of Cups, a story of “temptations, celebrity, and excess” starring Bale, Blanchett and Portman; and the potentially more interesting Project V (working title), a drama based on the Austin music scene, starring Gosling, Fassbender and Mara (plus Portman and Blanchett again).

Some footage of the latter was shown to Italian distributors last week, as reported on a local trade website, and an enterprising Ryan Gosling fansite has provided a rough translation:

From the short footage, we can guess that Ryan Gosling will star, an aspiring rock star. Around him gravitate two characters, one played by Michael Fassbender, who seems to be a business partner of Gosling, someone with whom the character can realize his musical ambitions. On the other side there is the character of Rooney Mara, who in the first part of the footage is clearly Gosling’s woman and then seems to weave a clandestine relationship with Fassbender. Around this love triangle gravitate two other women, Natalie Portman, in a novel blonde who seems to get in the good graces of Fassbender, while Cate Blanchett weaves his way with that of the character of Gosling.

Sounds interesting. I’m hoping for something along the lines of this…

…with a cameo from the only rock band in Austin who really matter.

At a Brooklyn Nets game, Wills and Kate found out how real royalty roll when Bey and Jay came over to the press the flesh.

Their presence might have been more appreciated outside, where protesters held a die-in to condemn recent killings of black suspects by white police officers. Read how the strange juxtaposition of events unfolded here.

Also last night: Joaquin P announced his engagement to a yoga instructor on Letterman…

…Nick Offerman’s solid wood emojis became a real thing (although they’re not as good as these ones)…

…oh, and Obama turned up on the Colbert Report. His presence might have been more appreciated etc etc

This trailer for South Park’s Christmas Special – yes, South Park is still going – features holograms of Elvis, Jacko and Kurt Cobain (as Dick Van Dyke, for some reason). It all looks a bit tame, until they introduce Taylor Swift and Bill Cosby…

Watch the episode in question a week tomorrow on Comedy Central to find out just how offensive they’re prepared to go.

Morning all. Usually it’s only dead pop stars who get turned into holograms, but the eternally sprightly Paul McCartney couldn’t wait that long. His video for bizarre Destiny videogame tie-in song Hope For The Future features a holographic Macca crooning his mawkish plea for peace and togetherness in front of some giant warships and stormtroopers with massive guns. Some future, Paul, some future. And, as we discovered last week, Macca doesn’t even play videogames.

Ironically, the whole thing reminds me of this.