‘On The Eleventh Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me…Love Actually’ (2003)
Time to get those glucose levels back up, and how. British Christmas films are surprisingly thin on the ground. It’s as if, having given A Christmas Carol to the world, we’d done all the heavy lifting required and could put our feet up for 200 years.
Despite our adoration of imported American sentiment, it isn’t something we seem to feel comfortable exploring ourselves with any great sincerity. Even The Snowman (the UK’s greatest contribution to Christmas culture since Dickens put down his quill) couldn’t get all the way to the end credits without killing one of the main characters.
However, there are one or two examples of home-grown Christmas films with big hearts that are becoming indispensable fireside stalwarts. Aardman’s Arthur Christmas is sweet, sophisticated fun, and I suspect that Get Santa will, after years of Christmas repeats, become an unmissable tradition. There’s also Bridget Jones’s Diary, or at least one third of it, all of which suggests that the very first thing you need to do if you want to make a British Christmas staple is to cast Jim Broadbent.
One film especially, via the relentless echoing through the TV schedules, has clawed its way to Christmas must-have immortality with a stalker’s insistence. The very mention of Love Actually might churn the stomachs of some movie-fans, but it’s surprising how well many of the disparate tales have stood up, especially Colin Firth’s Portuguese romance, rock star Bill Nighy’s bromance with Gregor Fisher and Martin Freeman and Joanna Page as the most British porn stars ever.
