Review

Christmas culture

Culture

Film & TV

24 December 2024

6 min read

The twelve days of Christmas TV

What to watch across the festive season.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

At a Christmas party, friend smile, laugh, and collapse in a heap on a sofa.

This is occurin'.

Christmas approaches! We are soon to begin the twelve-day marathon of celebrating the birth of Christ through food, drink, and…collapsing in front of the telly! It is a season of great joy and gladness, but also one of physical and mental exhaustion. To make it all a little easier I have finely combed through the Christmas edition of the Radio Times to present to you the one can’t miss televisual offering for each of the twelve days. Consider this my gift to all the readers of Seen & Unseen; hopefully a little more practical than a partridge in a pear tree.

On the first day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Gavin & Stacey: The Finale

Christmas Day, BBC 1, 9pm

The first G&S Christmas Special is an annual tradition in my household. My wife and I are guaranteed to watch it at least once in the run-up to Christmas. It is an example of a truly perfect piece of television: masterfully combining the necessarily contrived and mawkish sentimentality of Christmas telly, and the absurdist/realist/deadpan comedy that endeared the series to so many. The comeback Christmas Special in 2019 was a let-down on the night (I had such high expectations) but has grown on me over the years: nowhere near as good as the original, too self-referential and mannered for its own good, but still darn-funny, and acting as a rather sweet meditation on aging and parenthood. Christmas Day is all about family – be it our own family, or the Holy Family of Bethlehem – so why not see the day out in the warm glow of the Shipman-West family.

On the second day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Zulu

Boxing Day, Channel 4, 3.50pm

This one is personal for me. This is one of the first films I remember watching with my father, around the Christmas season. Glorious cinematography, a pacey plot, an electrifying final set-piece (which, 60 years later, is still more engaging than most of the bigger budget CGI shlock you can see today), a smattering of Welsh patriotism, and Michael Caine doing a posh accent. This is a classic for a reason: the remarkable story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift combined with a searing and sympathetic exploration of the British class system, ending with a meditation on both the unifying and horrifying nature of war. If you’re suffering from over-indulgence on Boxing Day I can’t think of a better tonic.

On the third day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Pitch Perfect

27 December, ITV 2, 9pm

The sequels very much delivered diminishing returns, but the original is such a wholesome piece of film-making. A celebration of music, growing-up, sisterhood and girl-power…it is feel-good fare from beginning to end. Anna Kendrick shines with raw singing-star-power, while Rebel Wilson provides just the right amount of comic relief. After the high of Christmas Day, and the slow come-down of Boxing Day, this film is like a warm bath of feel-good aca-enjoyment.

On the fourth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Maggie Smith at the BBC

28 December, BBC 2, 7pm

A celebration of the career of Maggie Smith on what would have been her 90th birthday. If that precis doesn’t hook you, then we can’t be friends.

On the fifth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

The Fugitive

29 December, Channel 5, 4.35pm

I can’t think of many thrillers better than this. From the very first scene this film has you on the edge of your seat asking the most terrifying of existential questions…

WHY DOES HARRISON FORD HAVE A BEARD!?!?!?

The tension only ratchets up from there! Harrison Ford plays the character he was born to play: a slightly gruff man, down on his luck, full of ingenuity, trying to prove that he didn’t murder his wife. Tommy Lee-Jones is similarly expertly cast as the long-suffering law-man who doesn’t follow procedure…no, he feels the case in his bones! The film rips along as such a rollicking pace that you’ll feel like it’s just started by the time it has finished.

On the sixth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Rocketman

30 December, Channel 4, 9pm

The music of Elton John is indestructible.

On the seventh day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Jools’ Annual Hootenanny

New Year’s Eve, BBC 2, 11.30pm

By now this is has become a cross between a National Treasure and a National Institution, and I cannot comprehend people who see the New Year in with anything else on their telly.

On the eighth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Airplane!

New Year’s Day, ITV 4, 9pm

This is the funniest film ever made. That is an indisputable fact, whether your metric is quantity or quality. The jokes come at a machine-gun rattle, and every single one hits their target! Absurdism, slapstick, wordplay, and the straight-face of Leslie Nielsen…THE FUNNIEST FILM EVER MADE!

On the ninth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World

2 January, BBC 2, 10pm

Russel Crowe deserved to have this film be the start of a worldwide phenomenal franchise; especially as Patrick O'Brian left us with twenty novels to work from. Crowe embodies Captain Jack Aubrey perfectly – oaken and noble and solid. Teaming him up with Paul Bettany for the second time is a masterstroke, as they bicker and play-off each other like old friends. There is action, emotion, intrigue, drama, and naval tactics. What isn’t to like?

On the tenth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

The Silence of the Lambs

3 January, ITV 1, 10.45pm

Anthony Hopkins serves us up plenty of leftover Christmas ham with his performance. His Hannibal Lecter is intelligent, sophisticated…and essentially and pantomime villain. His Hannibal is hammy with a capital H! Please don’t misunderstand me, I enjoy the performance and the film, but it isn’t a patch on Brian Cox’s bone-chillingly subtle, understated performance in Manhunter. Anyway, this is a terrifying film in the best way possible. Putting Hopkins aside, the performances are all spot on: Jodie Foster gives us an ingénue who’s vulnerability is both a weakness and her greatest strength, and Ted Levine is indescribably creepy as serial-killer Buffalo Bill. After ten days of Christmas lulling you into a soporific stupor, this flick is the icy wake-up you need!

On the eleventh day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

The Graduate/Rain Man

4 January, BBC 4, 9pm/11.20pm

Early-career Dustin Hoffman or mid-career Dustin Hoffman: take your pick. The is no wrong answer.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Aliens

5 January, ITV 4, 9pm

The rarest of creatures: a sequel which surpasses the original. Sigourney Weaver is iconic, and is the prototype for all future female action heroes. James Cameron takes Ridley Scott’s original claustrophobic horror masterpiece, and morphs it into a war-movie to rival ‘Saving Private Ryan’. It is a superb adrenaline-rush of a film. At the end of twelve days we can all echo Bill Paxton’s immortal words: Game over, man! Game over!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

BONUS GIFT…

Carols from King’s

Christmas Eve, BBC 2, 6pm

One of the finest examples of Anglican liturgy, perfectly combining atmosphere, music, and scripture. I’ve written a little article explaining why the service of Nine Lessons and Carols is a treasure we must not lose.

Read now

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Article

Attention

Culture

19 February 2025

5 min read

Will AI’s attentions amplify or suffocate us?

Keeping attention on the right things has always been a problem.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

A cute-looking robot with big eyes stares up at the viewer.

Robots - always cuter than AI.

Alex Knight on Unsplash.

Taking inspiration from human attention has made AI vastly more powerful. Can this focus our minds on why attention really matters?

Artificial intelligence has been developing at a dizzying rate. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot can automate everyday tasks and can effortlessly summarise information. Photorealistic images and videos can be generated from a couple of words and medical AI promises to revolutionise both drug discovery and healthcare. The technology (or at least the hype around it) gives an impression of boundless acceleration.

So far, 2025 has been the year AI has become a real big-ticket political item. The new Trump administration has promised half a trillion dollars for AI infrastructure and UK prime minister Keir Starmer plans to ‘turbocharge’ AI in the UK. Predictions of our future with this new technology range from doom-laden apocalypse to techno-utopian superabundance. The only certainty is that it will lead to dramatic personal and social change.

This technological impact feels even more dramatic given the relative simplicity of its components. Huge volumes of text, image and videos are converted into vast arrays of numbers. These grids are then pushed through repeated processes of addition, multiplication and comparison. As more data is fed into this process, the numbers (or weights) in the system are updated and the AI ‘learns’ from the data. With enough data, meaningful relationships between words are internalised and the model becomes capable of generating useful answers to questions.

So why have these algorithms become so much more powerful over the past few years? One major driver has been to take inspiration from human attention. An ‘attention mechanism’ allows very distant parts of texts or images to be associated together. This means that when processing a passage of conversation in a novel, the system is able to take cues on the mood of the characters from earlier in the chapter. This ability to attend to the broader context of the text has allowed the success of the current wave of ‘large language models’ or ‘generative AI’. In fact, these models with the technical name ‘Transformer’ were developed by removing other features and concentrating only on the attention mechanisms. This was first published in the memorably named ‘Attention is All You Need’ paper written by scientists working at Google in 2017.

If you’re wondering whether this machine replication of human attention has much to do with the real thing, you might be right to be sceptical. That said, this attention-imitating technology has profound effects on how we attend to the world. On the one hand, it has shown the ability to focus and amplify our attention, but on the other, to distract and suffocate it.

Attention is a moral act, directed towards care for others.

A radiologist acts with professional care for her patients. Armed with a lifetime of knowledge and expertise, she diligently checks scans for evidence of malignant tumours. Using new AI tools can amplify her expertise and attention. These can automatically detect suspicious patterns in the image including very fine detail that a human eye could miss. These additional pairs of eyes can free her professional attention to other aspects of the scan or other aspects of the job.

Meanwhile, a government acts with obligations to keep its spending down. It decides to automate welfare claim handling using a “state of the art” AI system. The system flags more claimants as being overpaid than the human employees used to. The politicians and senior bureaucrats congratulate themselves on the system’s efficiency and they resolve to extend it to other types of payments. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands are being forced to pay non-existent debts. With echoes of the British Post Office Horizon Scandal, the 2017-2020 the Australian Robo-debt scandal was due to flaws in the algorithm used to calculate the debts. To have a properly functioning welfare safety net, there needs to be public scrutiny, and a misplaced deference to machines and algorithms suffocated the attention that was needed.

These examples illustrate the interplay between AI and our attention, but they also show that human attention has a broader meaning than just being the efficient channelling of information. In both cases, attention is a moral act, directed towards care for others. There are many other ways algorithms interact with our attention – how social media is optimised to keep us scrolling, how chatbots are being touted as a solution to loneliness among the elderly, but also how translation apps help break language barriers.

Algorithms are not the first thing to get in the way of our attention, and keeping our attention on the right things has always been a problem. One of the best stories about attention and noticing other people is Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. A man lies badly beaten on the side of the road after a robbery. Several respectable people walk past without attending to the man. A stranger stops. His people and the injured man’s people are bitter enemies. Despite this, he generously attends to the wounded stranger. He risks the danger of stopping – perhaps the injured man will attack him? He then tends the man’s wounds and uses his money to pay for an indefinite stay in a hotel.

This is the true model of attention. Risky, loving “noticing” which is action as much as intellect. A model of attention better than even the best neuroscientist or programmer could come up with, one modelled by God himself. In this story, the stranger, the Good Samaritan, is Jesus, and we all sit wounded and in need of attention.

But not only this, we are born to imitate the Good Samaritan’s attention to others. Just as we can receive God’s love, we can also attend to the needs of others. This mirrors our relationship to artificial intelligence, just as our AI toys are conduits of our attention, we can be conduits of God’s perfect loving attention. This is what our attention is really for, and if we remember this while being prudent about the dangers of technology, then we might succeed in elevating our attention-inspired tools to make AI an amplifier of real attention.

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