IN THE games room of Ricky Hatton’s house, there stands a 3ft Santa with electric guitar and a button to be pushed if you want to be treated to a range of electronically destroyed Christmas tunes. Hatton’s five-year-old son, Campbell, insisted they have it and he is testing his father’s considerable pain threshold and powers of endurance with his appetite for Santa’s repertoire.

Santa, we can be sure, will be in full voice on Christmas Day. So will Hatton, who will have the whole family back after lunch for karaoke at his place, where he does an estimable Mack the Knife and Suspicious Minds. On New Year’s Eve he will be a minute’s walk down the hill in his local, the Queen Adelaide, where tradition has it that his lyrics will be somewhat bawdier.

There is nothing unusual in this routine for Manchester’s light-welterweight champion — he may have conquered the world but his own world hasn’t changed — but he acknowledges that he will enjoy the season that little bit more this time. It has, he says, “definitely” been the best year of his life.

“When you first lace on the gloves as a ten-year-old, you always dream of becoming a world champion,” he said. “When I became champion, the newspapers said it was one of the biggest ever fights in Britain — it just doesn’t get any better than that.”

It was so good that Hatton keeps on watching it. For the first month after he had beaten Kostya Tszyu, who was widely rated as one of the best boxers at any weight in the world, for the IBF title, he watched the tape pretty much every day. “Sometimes even now I watch the fight and I’m astonished with the shots that are going in,” he said. “I’m thinking: Jesus, did I really take them? It’s like: I can’t believe I’ve done that. For a while, I was almost checking it to make sure. It was so emotional that night.”

Which takes us to the highlight of his year, the highlight of his career, the moment’s fulfilment of a lifetime’s dreams. It is after the eleventh round, Hatton is on his stool: “And my trainer said: ‘Have you got three more good minutes in you?’ And I said: ‘F***ing right I have!’ But then he turned round and said ‘It’s over, it’s over.’ Tszyu had quit.

“I just collapsed, started crying, I didn’t have the strength to run round and celebrate. I’m on the canvas and I see Mum and Dad crying at ringside. That bit — when I watch that bit on the tape, I find my eyes welling up; for me, that bit is like watching The Champ. I guess because that was it, that was the dream.”

That bit sticks, but so, it seems, does almost every second. It is so vivid and his astonishment is such that it seems someone else was in the ring that night. The right hands, for instance, that he took in the fifth and eighth rounds, the same right hands that knocked out Zab Judah and Sharmba Mitchell, two of Tszyu’s greatest former foes.

“That right hand didn’t just knock out Judah and Mitchell, it practically lifted them off the floor,” Hatton said. “Yet when Tszyu nailed me with it in the fifth, it knocked my head back but I dropped my hands by my side and looked at him as if to go: ‘is that it?’ And I’m not big-headed, not a show-boater. He must have thought: that’s not supposed to happen. Every punch he hit me with, he hurt me. I always knew I had a good chin but, that night, he would have had to kill me to stop me. I really felt that was my moment.”

Talk about seizing the day. “Before, I’d always been the favourite in my fights,” he said, “I’d never been such a massive underdog. And normally I’m stronger physically than my opponent and can bully them a bit but this time I met someone who was as strong as me. And normally, in a 12-round fight, you’ve got to pace yourself but because of the nature of that fight, I don’t think I did. So I’d never been that tired before. And I think the only reason I could keep it up was because that was my moment, my heart just willed me on, just enabled me to keep going.”

Thus did Hatton go deeper than he had ever been before, to a place where the great fighters do their business, and that is also why “it’s the day I’m always going to be remembered for”. So 2005 was a massive year for Hatton; in it he had to take on Carlos Maussa, a relentlessly hard Colombian, to win the WBA title, and Frank Warren, a relentlessly hard businessman, but it is the Tszyu bout that won him the admiration that so astonishes him.

The down-to-earth, homeboy attitude does him mighty credit, cutting an obvious contrast to most he has passed on the rungs of the celebrity ladder. He remains tickled that he got to sit next to Paula Radcliffe and Kelly Holmes at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show — “I not only got invited to it, I got nominated!” — just as he remains flattered that Roy “Chubby” Brown should send him a signed photograph — “Can you believe it? This is a guy I’ve been going to see since I was a kid!” When he went to the Audley Harrison-Danny Williams bout a fortnight ago, a phone call could have had him ringside for free, but instead he drove down to London with his old mates and they sat in the seats they had bought not far from the back row.

The sportsmen that he does “like to be associated with” are Phil Taylor and Stuart Pearce, “unassuming people who don’t want fussing over”, he said. “I haven’t been given the chance to find the pitfalls of being high profile, or to be full of myself. But if I thought people thought that of me, it’d make me unwell. What’s the point of winning world titles and being on the telly if everyone thinks you’ re a bit of a tosser?

“And when you start to believe your own hype, particularly in boxing, that’s the worst thing you can do. If you think you’re better than you are outside the ring, that can be reflected in the way you are inside it.”

Many are they whose inflated self-opinion has been their downfall, and having just tucked away “the year” of his life, motivation could be a problem. But Hatton believes that would be a “criminal” mistake: “I’ve just reached my prime. I could say ‘I’ve done it now’, but I’d be a fool.

“The all-time greats, my heroes — Duran, Leonard, Hearns — they had three or four fights like my Kostya Tszyu. And that’s what I want, too.” More “best years” of his life, a longer highlights package and, because he remains capable of so astonishing himself, a tape that will reduce him to tears every time.