You can gauge a lot about a nation by its choice of Christmas viewing. Stuffed with turkey, trimmings and the rest, we Brits tend to be a sentimental lot. At least that's what the programmers think. So, like it or not, Christmas Day is traditionally marked by screenings of jolly festive favourites such as It's a Wonderful Life and White Christmas. The left-field option is to plonk yourself down in front of Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory or, perhaps, My Fair Lady. These hardy perennials have become as seasonal as mince pies and belligerent relatives.
This year, BBC1 is proud to unveil a new offering to terrestrial viewers: Titanic. The watery weepy is destined to join the ranks of schedule fillers on the one day of the year when the box is inescapable. But what movies, seasonal or otherwise, will our neighbours be watching tomorrow? Is the desire for mawkish movies part of the British disease or part of something universal?
The French won't be settling down en masse to watch Noel Blanc or anything of that ilk. Ironically, given their propensity for exporting moody, melodramatic cinema, they don't appreciate the heavy stuff in their own homes at this time of year. Turn on the telly tomorrow in Boulogne or Bordeaux and you will be entertained by noticeably lighter fare: black-and-white farces and Sixties spy spoofs. The face of Christmas is undoubtedly the strange, long-chinned visage of Fernandel, whose films are always shown. This year, his 1938 movie, Le Spountz, is on TV, as are L'Homme de Rio, a 1964 mock-espionage thriller which has been credited with inspiring Spielberg's Indiana Jones trilogy, and La Grande Vadrouille (The Great Escape), which stars not Steve McQueen but our own Terry-Thomas alongside France's finest comic actors in a wartime adventure comedy.
The Russians no longer have Boris Yeltsin's presidential antics to chortle at, but they can look forward to another broadcast of the Bolshoi's production of The Nutcracker. However, the real highlight of the day is the annual screening of a 1975 Soviet film called The Irony of Fate (Ironiya Sudby), a hugely popular romance and satire of communist conformity. It clocks in at a titanic 3 hours 12 minutes but is still an annual ratings winner. The film begins in a bleak, Orwellian nightmare of identical housing estates, where all the roads in every town have been renamed Lenin Street, Marx Prospect or Communist Highway and where everyone's furniture is manufactured by the same state-controlled factories.
On New Year's Eve, the film's hero, Zhenya, goes to the sauna with his two best friends - where they get helplessly drunk on vodka. He then stumbles on to a plane to Leningrad using a ticket that actually belongs to one of his drinking partners. When he arrives, he slurringly informs an airport taxi driver what his Moscow home address is and is promptly driven to the same address in Leningrad - where there is an identical tower block, an identical doorway, an identical lock which his key opens and, inside the flat, identical furniture - only, confusingly for him in his drunken stupor, it has been arranged in a slightly different way.
He drags off his clothes and falls into what he thinks is his own bed, where he is swiftly discovered by the horrified owner of the flat a young and beautiful Polish woman. After a fierce row about who has broken into whose flat, the two find themselves falling in love. Ahhh.
The Germans, too, feel able to let their guard down and stomach a large helping of sugary sentiment each year. Christmas in Germany isn't complete without repeated servings of Little Lord Fauntleroy . The lavish 1980 adaptation, starring Rick Schroder as the upwardly-mobile brat and Alec Guinness as the mis anthropic toff, is being shown not once but five times this year. Not bad for a television movie. Germany's apparent fondness for Little Lord Fauntleroy is revealing in another way, highlighting the global reach of English-language movies on MTV (Murdoch Televsion).
In most of Europe, audiences will be sinking into sofas to watch generic Hollywood blockbusters rather than homegrown idiosyncracies. Although the Spanish prefer star-studded TV variety shows to movies, an oddly dubbed version of The Sound of Music (entitled Sonrisas y Lagrimas, or 'Smiles and Tears') is ever popular. This year, it is joined by Robin Hood (the Errol Flynn version), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Little Women. In Poland, tomorrow's line-up is just as familiar: Death on the Nile , Hook , The Saint and James Bond's Tomorrow Never Dies . Even in Warsaw, Christmas just isn't Christmas without 007.
