Good grief, I have drunk a lot of alcohol. I don't mean today - I am actually in a state of not altogether welcome sobriety as I write this - I mean over this whole festive season. I am filled up with alcohol. I have to negotiate my way around my home with the utmost care - if I bounce or jiggle or turn my head too sharply, the alcohol slops up against the inside and trickles out my ears. I have drunk so much alcohol that my body hardly absorbs it any more - the very cytoplasm of my cells has become so saturated that it will accept no more. Any alcohol I ingest now just sits there, slooshing around every so often in an unpleasant fashion.

Oh my goodness! What a terrible thought I've just had! What if I become immune to alcohol, in the way that Cold war operatives in spy novels made themselves immune to certain kinds of poisons and snake venoms by regularly dosing themselves with large but non-lethal quantities of the toxin? What if alcohol never again has upon me those pleasing effects I so cherish?

What would life be like without ever again swaying, staggering, slurring, starting late-night quarrels, making inappropriate advances, imagining I can dance, placing ill-conceived wagers and weeping melancholically to the songs of Marlene Dietrich? It is scarcely worth imagining.

Many people, of course, overindulge over the Christmas season, for a variety of reasons, but I suspect a worldwide survey would reveal that television columnists overindulge more than most.

Something pleasingly seasonally surreal about the spectacle of little Helmie imitating Elvis

For me it began, as it so often does, with Helmut Lotti. My Tribute To The King (SABC3; Tuesday; 1.30pm) was just the thing to satisfy the inchoate spiritual yearnings of a nation huddled before the television set on Christmas Eve.

Who was the King fortunate enough to receive the Lottster's humble tribute? Was it the King of Peace and Light of the World? Was it King Zog of Albania? Was it a tribute to Little Lotti's own divine ruler, the King of the Munchkins? No, sir! No, ma'am! It was a tribute to Elvis Presley, broadcast from a location styled and designed to resemble a casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For all I know it may actually have been a casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ten minutes of My Tribute To The King and it was beginning to feel a lot like Christmas in the Hot Medium household, I can tell you. Mainly because I had poured the brandy from the Christmas pudding over my head and down my throat and was trying desperately to set fire to it.

I suppose there was something pleasingly seasonally surreal about the spectacle of little Helmie imitating Elvis in front of a polite crowd of dozens. He looked so cute up there in his shiny striped waistcoat and his immaculately moussed hair and his little wiggles and the sexy way he played air-trombone during the orchestral sections (Yes! Orchestral sections!). His mother must have been so proud - he had all the moves, almost like a real singer. Not a real rock 'n roll singer, though. If Elvis primarily sold sex wrapped up like music, Helmut Lotti looked as though he was in the business of selling ice cream wrapped up like ice cream. It is not stirring to watch pelvic thrusts from someone who is too young to be allowed onto the casino floor.

"Elvis has gone," Baron von Lottenstein informed us in breathless voice-over, "but the songs live on. Pure, like pearls, they roll across the street of fame, into eternity."

Ah, it was a good Christmas, from what I remember

Laughing like a drain, I rolled across the sofa of infamy and poured myself a drink.

And that set the tone for the season, I am afraid. Christmas time is generally a good time for classic movies on television. What better way to see in the blessed day, I always say, than that heartwarming yarn of slave ownership, bloody warfare and burning cities, Gone With the Wind? (TCM; DSTV; Christmas Day)

Applying myself to my task, I watched Rhett and Scarlett through the happy golden haze of a mint julep. Ooh, it was tasty, and it gave me the opportunity to make a funny joke, which is really the most that one can wish from life.

"Could I have some of your mint julep?" someone asked me with a thirsty tone of voice. "Frankly, my dear," I said, twitching my upper lip as though it had a moustache, "I don't give a dram."

Oh, how I laughed. But isn't that always the case with Christmas Day? Cry, and you can be reasonably sure that secretly most of the world is crying with you. Laugh, and you laugh alone.

For Ben-Hur (TCM; DSTV) I contented myself with a steady infusion of wine, because it was set largely in Rome, you see, and Romans drank a lot of red wine. Didn't they? Well, I did. I was intending to lay in a stock of grog to toast Charlton Heston's time as a galley slave, but I wasn't entirely sure what you might put in grog. I popped around to my local bottle store, but they appeared to be fresh out of grog. "I can offer you creme de menthe," offered the store owner hopefully, but I just snarled. "No grog, no deal," I said.

I wasn't sure what to drink while watching The Wizard Of Oz (TCM; DSTV). What is an Oz-themed cocktail? In the end I plumped for beer. Why? Because that was all I had left. Ah, it was a good Christmas, from what I remember. There are no doubt those of you who can press on through the holidays without an intravenous supply of inflammatory Christmas cheer, and perhaps one day I shall count myself among your number. But for now I have discovered a shaker of gin that slipped between the sofa cushions, so if you will excuse me, I have to get to work on an antidote to my immunity.