Blog · Radio
Chris, it’s not December yet
Recently I came across someone on LinkedIn who had built a website that tracks where and when Phil Collins (and Genesis) is played on Dutch radio. That person’s perception: Phil is a bit overexposed on the radio. And then you have two options: grumble about it, or measure it. Measuring is knowing, and above all an excellent excuse to keep yourself busy for a weekend.
I read that and immediately thought of something else. That annual moment. You know it’s going to happen when Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas is played for the first time. Then it’s official: Christmas has started, the supermarket has been at it for weeks and somewhere in a car Chris is stuck in traffic. And I want to know when that is. Who plays it first, at what time, and how often afterwards?
If someone can do that for Phil, I thought, there must be a central source somewhere with what all the stations play. There was (found it!), so I went to investigate. And since I was at it, I dedicated a whole page to it: Same song again?. As you can see, yes, that happens more often, I got a little carried away.
The technology behind it
It sounds heavier than it is, but there is quite a bit to it.
On my server a PHP script runs every five minutes and asks that central source what 28 Dutch stations have played. It is stored neatly in an SQLite database: one file, no database server, no fuss. Every play gets a station, an artist, a title and a time. In effect it is a logbook of everything Dutch radio has said, or rather sung, over the past weeks.
Collecting it was less smooth than it sounds, because the search function of that source returns at most about thirty results per query. A search for a song that comes by a lot (I’m not naming names, Chris) gets cut off. My solution: I halve the time window until nothing gets cut off any more. Ask for a whole year and it becomes half a year, a quarter, a month, a week, until every slice fits. A bit like dividing a cake among too many people.
Then I didn’t want to start measuring only from now, so I ran a catch-up over the past thirty days. There was some cleaning up too: an apostrophe sometimes turns into a comma in the source, so Isn’t becomes Isn,T, and the same artist is spelled three ways depending on who typed it and what time it was. There is now clever grouping, otherwise Chris Rea, Chris Rea & Band and Chris Rea feat. Chris Rea would show up as three different artists in the list.
Every ten minutes a second script writes all the figures to one JSON file. The page fetches that in the browser and draws the charts itself, with plain JavaScript and SVG, no external libraries and no cookies. Hover over a chart and you see the numbers. I had said those had to be there, and I am stubborn.
One small detail that nearly bit me: my own deploy script cleans up everything that isn’t in the source code. That is tidy, but it would have thrown the data file away at every update. So that folder is now on the exceptions list. Lesson learned: whoever cleans up should also know what must not go.
What comes out
An astonishing number of useful, no, useless facts come out of such a pile of data. Which station repeats the most (at some, a song comes back on average more than forty times a month), which song is played on the most stations, which song has been covered by the most different artists and at what hour of the day you are most likely to hear a hit you have already heard a thousand times. NPO Radio 5 and NPO Radio 2 vary the most, by the way. My favourites, in case you wondered. Pure coincidence, of course.
And then Chris. The data now holds what I have been able to trace back so far: 617 plays of Driving Home for Christmas since the start of 2025, 529 of them in December last year. The first to play it last year? Sky Radio, on 1 December at 01:29 at night. That is not a radio station any more, that is an alarm clock.
But here is the thing: it has also been played outside December. From January to November last year 72 times, and this year already sixteen times up to the end of October. Chris, it’s not December yet. The page has its own section for it, with a countdown to 1 December at 00:00 and a block that will show which station gets the scoop. Last year that was Sky Radio. Who will it be this year?
Chris Rea died on 22 December 2025. That is why it says (1951–2025), and why I try to keep the jokes warm: they are a wink at a song that comes back every winter, not at the man. There is also a separate page about Chris with the story behind the song, with sources.
And otherwise I overdid it
You can see it in the rest of the page: a table with all 28 stations, with a link to listen live and some background on each station, a clown corner with the best trivia, a Dutch version, share buttons, a popup with everything about Chris, and a little radio in the footer. All for a song that happens to come back every year. The plan was a little counter. It has become a radio station, without a transmitter.
Fascinating what you can get out of something like this in useless facts, I will say that. Have a look around: Same song again?. And thanks for reading this nonsense! 😜
Stay safe,
Pim