What’s the deal with terrible Channel 5 Christmas movies?
Each December, we Brits can’t scroll through the TV guide without finding low-budget Christmas movies clogging up Channel 5’s listings, but have you ever sat down and properly watched one?
Over the years, I’ve certainly found myself watching chunks of a bad festive Hallmark movie while waiting for my food to finish cooking, or perhaps I’ll end up with one playing in the background as I frantically organise my Christmas wrapping. Last weekend, though, I finally experienced one of these terrible festive films in full when a pizza and movie night with my housemates devolved into watching A Very British Christmas at midnight as we made some decorations for our little tree.
Now, we all knew it was going to be bad, but when you actually sit and watch one in earnest, it really makes you wonder how these kinds of films, which are about as cinematic as an A-level film student’s final project, get greenlit. I mean, sure, people love Christmas, and people love romance, so I can see why these kinds of cookie-cutter, festive-themed, made-for-television movies requiring very little budget and minimal talent are constantly churned out, but the thing is, they’re really, really bad.
Everyone knows that Hallmark has been championing this kind of piss poor Christmas film for years now, creating an endless supply of movies with identical posters and an admittedly great title (Single and Ready to Jingle is a personal favourite), but now it seems like Britain has given the genre a crack, too. While the cringe factor of these American Hallmark movies is high, for a British viewer like myself, there’s something much more enticing about indulging in the British equivalent.
So, A Very British Christmas, which was not actually made by Hallmark (but might as well have been), is one of various UK-based slices of low-budget cinematic crime, sitting alongside other heinous entries like Christmas in Notting Hill and Christmas in Scotland. It’s set in the lovely Yorkshire town of Knaresborough, which one of the American characters pronounces as ‘Knares-borrow’, sending a shiver down your spine. Here, we follow an opera singer from the United States named Jessica who ends up in this quiet town after she falls asleep on the train. Now, I’m not sure what route she’d have to take to end up there, but that clearly doesn’t matter when the magic of Christmas is involved.
Once she arrives and befriends another American, whose acting skill is the definition of wooden, she ends up meeting a man who is definitely not from Yorkshire, despite his claims, and his young daughter, who insists on referring to this grown woman as “sweetheart” with a real Yorkshire twang.
As the story unfolds, we get a whole plot about mining, grief is intertwined with the hope for a new beginning in love, and of course, Jessica finds herself torn between going back to New York and staying in this new place, the polar opposite of what she’s used to, in the name of romance.
Terribly acted and with a script that would surely not even scrape a pass if you presented it in a film class, A Very British Christmas presents a rather dull image of Knaresborough, and there’s really nothing about the movie that makes you feel particularly invested in the characters and their predicaments.
You can hardly call this a film, but are these kinds of terrible festive flicks only popular because they’re so blindingly awful? While the film is rated extremely poorly on Letterboxd, over on IMDB, people have some pretty positive things to say about the “family-friendly” movie and its “unadulterated escapism”. Another user describes it as “humorous and heartwarming”, while someone else calls it “a feel-good film”. This is really quite curious, because how anyone could watch such a film and not think it’s one of the most dire excuses for cinema is baffling.
The general consensus seems to be that if you make a movie festive, wholesome, romantic, and cosy enough, a decent amount of people will lap it up, no matter how technically ‘good’ it is. I guess that’s what Hallmark and Channel 5 have discovered, since there are more people than you’d expect who enjoy this kind of thing, or maybe it’s just that Christmas makes masses more susceptible to watching pure shite.
I’d argue that there’s no way to watch something like this other than by viewing it through the lens of being a campy mess, the clearly edited fake snow and the dodgy accents a testament to Susan Sontag’s definition of camp. “It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed, the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” she wrote back in 1964.
So maybe these films are an accidental work of high camp brilliance? Or perhaps they’re just a cheap ploy to make money at the most profitable, sorry, wonderful, time of year.
