A regional daily parodied a Christmas classic after government calls to cancel festive parties due to coronavirus.

The Dundee Evening Telegraph ran the splash spoofing ‘Fairytale of New York’ by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl.

The Telegraph came up with the front page after Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon urged people to consider deferring Christmas parties due to the new Omicron variant of Covid-19.

The splash parodied the video accompanying the 1987 Christmas hit, with Ms Sturgeon’s face appearing superimposed over that of the late Ms MacColl.

Jason Leitch, National Clinical Director of the Scottish Government, appeared as Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan.

The accompanying headline parodied the song’s refrain ‘And the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day’, replacing the last word with ‘delay’ instead.

The Telegraph also dubbed the warning as a ‘scary tale’ in reference to the song’s title on Saturday’s front page.

Telegraph head of print Ross Logan told HTFP: “The Tele is quite local a lot of the time and we don’t always do national stories unless we can do it in a slightly different way.

“We were racking our brains and the graphics guys we really good and executed the plan first time.

“I was really happy with it and I thought it was a really good way of telling people what they already know, but in a different way.

“The Tele always try to take a sideways look at that sort of stuff.”