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

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Article

Culture

Holidays/vacations

Mental Health

Wildness

18 July 2025

5 min read

This is why we must go down to the sea

Stepping off the shore restores more than our sanity

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A sunset over an island casts golden light on the sea and a beach.

An Argyll beach.

Nick Jones.

It’s that time of year again. Much of Britain has been enjoying (or possibly enduring) a heatwave, the summer holidays are approaching, and our thoughts naturally turn toward an escape from our ordinary, often urban, landlocked, lives. And for many of us that escape will be to the sea. It’s true, we really do like to be beside the seaside. As a nation our souls seem to suffer from an annual experience like that described in John Masefield’s poem Sea-Fever as we head coastwards muttering ‘I must go down to the sea again...’

We want to holiday by the sea – as the market for second homes in places like Cornwall will confirm. We also want to live permanently by the sea, or at the very least by the water. Some experts estimate that properties by the water have an average increased value of around 48 per cent. Water sells. It does so perhaps because proximity to it provides something of a mental escape from the overwhelming rigidity and linearity of our predominantly urban environments.

Iain MacGilchrist has argued that our modern lives suffer from the triumph of the left-brain hemisphere’s attention to the world. This is a focussed attention that is all about controlling and getting. It leads to the creation of a self-contained and ordered world with little attention to context. And so little attention to the natural, complex, fluid reality of creation. MacGilchrist goes on to correlate the rise in a variety of mental illnesses characterised by what he calls ‘right hemisphere deficits’ with industrialisation and the development of our culture of modernity.

In his book Blue Mind Wallace Nichols explores the evidence for the positive effect of water on the brain. He highlights how a proximity to water can heal, restore, give us a sense of connection and promote calm. He argues that water can shift our minds into what he calls ‘drift’, the kind of mental attention which generates calm. Being with, on, better still in water, is undoubtedly good for us. No wonder we are drawn to it.

Yet at the same time water, and particularly the sea, has been a source of terror. A no-go area ‘where there be dragons’, OK, lobsters for sure, probably sharks, and whales like Moby Dick. The sea remains one of the last places of mystery, an unfathomed, unfathomable place of endless dark water. We know more about the far reaches of the universe than we do about the truly deep ocean. Mythical creatures of the deep, whether Nessie, or one of various giant specimens hauled unsuspectingly from the ocean, continue to populate the diminishing space of our wonder and fear of the unknown.

So whilst elucidating the psychological benefits of water is certainly helpful, it’s all a bit…tame. Is it just another way of humans turning the wild and numinous into something we now think we understand? Something we can now control and apply in our lives for our own benefit and comfort? Have we demystified the sea? Reducing its mysteries to little more than a balm for our troubled modern minds? A lure for our attention and our debt in an overheated housing market?

In the Christian tradition the sea is a place of profound paradox. Creation begins with God’s Spirit hovering over the water. However, the Hebrew scriptures also present the sea as a place of God’s absence. The sea is the place of monsters and mystery, and death. It’s also the place of perhaps the most famous whale in all literature. The whale that swallows the hapless Jonah. Jonah’s story expresses the deep paradox of the sea as a place of death and yet also a place of divine encounter. It is in the depths of the sea, and the digestive system of the whale, that Jonah’s epiphany takes place and his journey starts anew.

Stories of Jesus also deal with this paradox of wildness and encounter in the chaos of the sea. In the story of the calming of the storm the wild threat of the sea is not rendered as simply something to be avoided. Jesus is not a fixer making all daily dangers obsolete. Rather the story says that it is precisely in such moments of wildness, fury and terror that his powerful presence can be encountered.

To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life.

It’s for these reasons perhaps that, John Good, a friend of mine, has formed a Christian community that’s based around encounter with the sea. Located as it is in an area almost surrounded by the sea, it started as a social enterprise helping people access the water who otherwise lacked the equipment or resource to do so. Pretty soon it became clear that this was transformational for people. Enabling families otherwise excluded from a life-giving resource to enjoy it as much as anyone else was powerful. One person referred to the experience by saying that on that day the sea had been ‘her saviour.’ Ocean Church began with a gathering on three large, tethered paddleboards some metres offshore. They now run retreats and pilgrimages on the sea, practice centering prayer (a form of Christian meditation or contemplative prayer) on the sea and continue to explore what it means to meet God on the water.

We yearn for the sea, and the water, for more than a balm for the mind. The sea remains that place, in our mechanised, technological world with its constant lure of control and mastery, where an immersion in dangerous mystery can still be experienced. To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life. To be held buoyant by the sea and look to the horizon is to get it touch with our finitude in the context of the vastness of the seas. It is to engage with our utter dependency on the creation which we inhabit and to connect with the presence that holds that creation together.

To step into the sea is even therefore a step of faith. A step in the direction of our own vulnerability. A brave step away from the world in which our technology, our algorithms, our machines and our skyscrapers dupe us into a faith in our own control, our own supremacy. A step into the depths. ‘Deep calls to deep’ says the psalmist as ‘all your waves and breakers have swept over me.’ As many of us step into the sea this summer it may certainly be a step toward a restored sanity, but it might also be a step toward a restored soul.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now