They wear designer clothing, drink cocktails, drive supercars and speak in hushed, over-elocuted voices, with which they say things like, “it isn’t seemly”. I wonder if Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is the inspiration for them all. They are cashmere clad and reek of politesse, but I don’t think they do their own laundry. There is no spiritual seeking in Belgravia: the thing they most covet is covered with diamonds. They say so themselves. Watching it, I had a flashback to The Holiday, and a scene in which, as kindly Iris has a party, a servant appears in the background, polishing a glass. I have a long paragraph of Marxist interpretation on these films, but I will spare you – it’s Christmas. 

Above all, Romancing the Star is an advert for Christmas decorations. I counted eight Christmas trees in one room in the palace, and, to their credit, they steal every scene they appear in. Even though Netflix executives seem to yearn for an ancient aristocracy – don’t they know that in the ideal Christmas film you recover your innocence, not your Feudalism? – they don’t really understand class. Under no circumstances would Elizabeth II and her heirs hang a giant electrified sleigh on Windsor Castle. 

Father Christmas is Back (2021) made me weep in entirely the wrong way. The premise is: Kelsey Grammer, destroying the reputation he made with the brilliant sitcom Frasier in one lazy bound, plays a man returning to his four daughters on Christmas Day, having abandoned them on Christmas Day 27 years earlier. There is an interesting premise here for a Christmas film, I give you, but it would be made by Mike Leigh. The family name is Christmas: so here is Father Christmas, a cosmetic dentist wearing an annoying linen scarf, returning with a girlfriend in tow, preparing to make amends to daughters who are younger than she is.  

The setting is, again, a vast country house in Britain. It is owned by Kris Marshall, a toff married to daughter no.1, a control freak so dedicated to a perfect Christmas she rejects her children’s “toilet roll decorations” and accuses them of wanting to put a toilet brush at the top of the tree. (“The Twelve Days of Sewage,” she calls it, in a rare moment of self-awareness for this film.) Liz Hurley is sister no.2, welded to high fashion with a gormless Rolls Royce-owning man in tow. (She is having a baby. At 56.) Caroline Quentin is the mother; John Cleese is her lover. Together they snort, pretending to be bulls, in a love scene that will melt your eyeballs. Father Christmas arrives uninvited and throws them into chaos. He comes from Miami: “I’ve not had a girlfriend over 40 yet.”