Cooler Britannia: how British artists dominated 2011

In the year its first presenter, great English eccentric Jimmy Savile, died, Top of the Pops is coming back with a Christmas edition that will only feature UK music. It's a fitting move after 12 months in which Pop Britannia has ruled both here and abroad.

This was meant to be Lady Gaga's year again, as she returned with an overblown second album and her latest range of fashion madness. Instead, the world ended up celebrating the opposite in the shapely form of Adele, a singer who simply stands in a spotlight and sings. She has generated an explosion of sales statistics that could fill this page: her album 21 and its 2008 predecessor, 19, are far and away the two bestselling albums of 2011 in Britain; 21 and the song Someone Like You are the biggest-selling album and single of the year in the US; and 21 has spent more weeks at number one in America than any album since the Titanic soundtrack.

Adele will be seen on Christmas Top of the Pops in a recording made at her Albert Hall show in September, while those appearing on the show in person form a parade of the ordinary - the kind of singers you might meet down the pub on Christmas Eve in another life. It's appropriate, given the kind of musicians who currently dominate in this country, that the battle for the Christmas number one single has been between unremarkable X Factor winners Little Mix and a group of unsung real-life heroines, the Military Wives.

Alongside both of those acts, the rock bands that Top of the Pops is showing, The Vaccines and Noah and the Whale, are both sets of nice, well-spoken lads whom you may well have bumped into at university. While there's a pallid punkishness to the sound of the former, no elderly relatives will be choking on their sprouts in outrage.

Continuing the everyman theme, there's Example, a dance producer behind two number one hits who could surely pass unmolested down any high street in Britain, and Olly Murs, a smiley X Factor graduate who has somehow been accepted as the nation's Robbie Williams substitute and is booked to play not one but two nights at the O2 Arena in February.

Even when we try to mimic the style of our US counterparts, we do it without the starriness. Our take on Eminem and Rihanna's huge hit, Love the Way You Lie, is Professor Green and Emeli Sandé's Read All About It, a recent number one to be performed on TOTP on Sunday. Green may have the tattooed neck but he's better at rapping funny than psychotic, while Sandé, next year's Brit Awards Critics' Choice winner, couldn't be more sensible. The Scot completed a BSc degree in clinical neuroscience at the University of Glasgow before she was ready to devote herself to her singing career.

Throw a traffic cone into any student union bar and you'll hit 15 Ed Sheerans - the self-made solo act whose relentless DIY gigging turned his single The A Team, which he performs on Christmas TOTP, into one of the biggest hits of the year. Singing about his DVD collection and his computer game abilities, he's got fans relating, not escaping into the fantasy world of big-selling pop heroes.

Our sole remaining star in the batty space alien mould is Jessie J. There's certainly nothing plain about her hurricane of a voice, as we'll see on Sunday, but even she has a line in gabbling chit-chat that could rival Adele in the race to see whose onstage banter most resembles that of your hairdresser.

These Ordinary Joes and Joannes still have cunning marketing strategies of course - it can take a lot of work to appear to be just like you and me. Adele's lack of gigging and tweeting is a plan in itself, but a take-me-as-I-am approach does rely much more heavily on the quality of the songs. What many of these homegrown successes have - with Adele as the prime example - is great music that appeals at face value without the hype. That's worth waving the flag for.

Top of the Pops is on BBC1 at 2pm on Christmas Day.