IN so many respects, 2016 was such an avalanche of bad news that it made you want to sell up and retire to a remote island with no TV or phone reception.

The bad news doesn’t need rehearsing here. So where was the good news, the uplifting news last year? It could be found. You just had to know where to look.

First, there was the way people opened their hearts to Bradley Lowery, a terminally five-year-old from Hartlepool.

Bradley was just two years old when he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. After two years of gruelling chemotherapy his cancer went into remission but his family learned in July that it had returned in an aggressive form. Bradley, a Sunderland fan, has been guest of honour at the Stadium of Light and was even featured on Match of the Day, scoring a penalty against the Chelsea goalkeeper. He received 250,000 Christmas cards from around the world, and has become famous.

His family posted on Facebook last week that Bradley had started his chemotherapy, and that a trip to the Harry Potter studios in London was being arranged. “It is all about having fun and making special memories that will last forever,” they said.

Erin Cross, six, from Chester, who had lymphoblastic leukaemia, flew to Seattle in the summer after £100,000 was raised via ITV's This Morning show. She trialled a new, experimental, pioneering gene-therapy treatment. Her family has now learned that blood tests reveal the cancer has completely disappeared.

She was expected to be well enough last Wednesday to undergo a bone marrow transplant.

Also in December, it was reported that Ocrelizumab, a drug that alters the immune system, can slow progression of multiple sclerosis, according to results of its phase-three trials. It is the first treatment that can slow the advancement of primary progressive MS, the MS Society said. It can also treat relapsing MS. The drug is now under review by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The kindness of strangers, as we saw in the cases of Bradley and Erin, was also evident when the memory of Jo Cox, the Labour MP so senselessly murdered in June, was marked by a charity single, an all-star cover of the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want. The Stones waived their claim on royalties, and more than £35,000 was raised for the Jo Cox Foundation.

It’s a sobering thought that Barack Obama will soon be replaced by Donald Trump, but there was a final piece of good news from Obama. Reaching for a 1953 law, he launched an "indefinite" ban on new oil and gas drilling in most US-owned waters in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. Canada also banned new oil and gas leasing in its Arctic waters. The measures, Obama said, “protect a sensitive and unique ecosystem that is unlike any other region on earth. They reflect the scientific assessment that, even with the high safety standards that both our countries have put in place, the risks of an oil spill in this region are significant and our ability to clean up from a spill in the region’s harsh conditions is limited.”

Sport offered several great stories this year. Andy Murray had a quite outstanding year, and his Hibs team finally won the Scottish Cup, beating Rangers 2-1 in dramatic fashion at Hampden. It was their first Scottish Cup since 1902. Down south, Leicester City, who had flirted with relegation the previous season, staged an astonishing campaign under manager Claudio Ranieri to win the Premier League title, a feat that appealed to sports’ romantics everywhere. In August, Match of the Day host Gary Lineker, a former Leicester player, carried out a rash promise to present the first programme of the new season in his boxers if his old team became champions.

In September, runner Alistair Brownlee helped his ailing brother Jonny over the line in the final race of the World Triathlon Series in Cozumel, Mexico. Afterwards Alistair told the BBC: "It's an awful position to be in. If he'd conked out before the finish line and there wasn’t medical support it could have been really dangerous.

"It was a natural human reaction to my brother but for anyone I would have done the same thing. I think it's as close to death as you can be in sport.”

And in tennis, Scots-born Gordon Reid had a stellar year, finishing as number one wheelchair tennis player. He won singles gold and doubles silver at the Rio Olympics and also triumphed at Wimbledon and the Australian Open.

And while we’re on the subject of Rio, of course, Team GB’s remarkable heroics – 27 golds, 23 silvers, 17 bronze – made even the most jaded armchair-viewer sit up straight. The Paralympics team took 64 gold medals and finished second in the medals table behind China.

British astronaut Tim Peake made history as the first man to complete a marathon in space. On a treadmill on board the International Space Station, he ran the London Marathon in three hours, 35 minutes and 21 seconds.

At a time when the divide between rich and poor grew ever larger, it was heartening to read that a wealthy Indian businessman decided to spent the equivalent of £93,000 not on his daughter’s wedding, as originally planned, but on building 90 houses on two acres of land for local poor people. Take a bow, Ajay Munot.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has devoted vast chunks of his personal fortune to combating extreme poverty and improving healthcare, also turns out to be a rather generous Secret Santa. The billionaire philanthropist was responsible for a woman named Aerrix Laurel receiving a rather nice collection of festive gifts – an X-Box One, a Nintendo Classic Edition, some Blu-Ray DVDs and mittens – as part of the Reddit online community’s Secret Santa programme.

The West Brom player James McClean, 27, offered to buy a caravan for a pregnant homeless woman after hearing she was sleeping rough. And on Boxing Day, Taylor Swift made a surprise personal appearance at the Missouri home of a Second World War veteran, 96-year-old Cyrus Porter.

There was great TV in 2016: Billions, Planet Earth II, Fleabag, The Night Manager, The Crown, National Treasure, Stranger Things, Westworld. The US stand-up comedian Amy Schumer brilliantly stood up to the trolls who sought to fat-shame her after her name was linked with the lead role in a live-action Barbie film.

Fed up with nights-out at the cinema or the theatre being ruined by thoughtless people who can’t leave their mobile phones alone? There was good news here, too: Viscount Falkland, 81, irritated by his god-daughter texting as the lights went down in a Paris theatre, snatched the phone and threw it away. These mobile-phone pests can be dealt with in public.

Elsewhere, Bob Dylan got the Nobel Literature Prize he deserved. The Nobel Peace Prize went to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos "for his resolute efforts to bring the country's more than 50-year-long civil war to an end". Thirty-one years after his death, the great Philip Larkin was commemorated in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The German-language Ooom magazine published its list of the year's most inspiring people, among them Obama, Pope Francis and Leonardo DiCaprio, the latter for his captivating climate-change documentary, Before The Flood. But they lost out to Anja Ringgren Lovén, a Danish care worker who adopted a two-year-old Nigerian boy allegedly cast out by his community for being a "witch-child".

Reddit also posts lots of uplifting news. Most recent headlines include "Animal shelter celebrates when all its dogs adopted in time for Christmas" and "Pennsylvania man wins free pizza for a year, gives prize away to local food bank". They're worth a read – and they're a reminder that even 2016 had good news, if you knew where to look.

Anyway, 2017 is now here. A clean sheet, and all that. Ignore Trump's tweet about his wish to “greatly strengthen and expand” his country's nuclear capability. What could possibly go wrong with that?