Think of Christmas films and the chances are your mind is drawn towards snowmen, mistletoe and Jimmy Stewart.
But analysis of five decades of Christmas TV schedules in the UK reveal that the most-aired films feature a magic car, a straw man and Kenneth Williams.
Only one in eight films shown on the main UK channels over the past 50 festive periods has been Christmas-related – even if you include contentious “Christmas films” such as Die Hard and Gremlins.
Instead, the Carry On films join the more obvious choices of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Wizard of Oz as the most regularly screened on UK television.
Although Christmas films – classed here as those tagged as such on IMDb – make up a small proportion, it has grown in recent years. Only 8% of the films scheduled between 20 December and 1 January were Christmas films before the millennium, but they made up 19% in recent decades.
Of the top 10 films on our list, only four are Christmas-related. And these were mainly aired after the year 2000.
But if you are thinking that an enduring classic such as It’s a Wonderful Life tops the Christmas film bill, you’d be mistaken. That honour goes to Santa Claus: the Movie.
The film, which left the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw asking why “there are no workhouses for the people who made it”, has aired 21 times on UK screens since its 1985 release.
Two versions of Scrooge, the film adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol released in 1951 and 1970, and the 1989 family comedy National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation complete the list of the most popular Christmas-related films on our screens during the last 10 days of the year.
But it is musicals that win out – at least among those who set our TV schedules. Between them, the three most popular films – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Mary Poppins and The Wizard of Oz – plus the 1970 musical version of Scrooge (in fifth place behind Santa Claus: the Movie) have appeared dozens of times across the five main UK channels’ Christmas TV schedules.
While they do have a natural advantage in being older – the first two were both made in the 1960s; while Dorothy has been following the yellow brick road since 1939 – their appeal has endured in later decades.
And it is not just films that have become classics at Christmas, but also some faces.
Sir Michael Caine is the most visible actor on British TV during the Christmas week, most frequently as Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, but also as a German paratrooper on a mission to kill Churchill in The Eagle has Landed – as well as the leader of a gang of robbers in The Italian Job.
Caine is followed closely by John Wayne and Kenneth Williams, whose face has appeared on our screens in Christmas week in almost every year since 1975 via the Carry On films. The long-running comedy franchise has been shown nearly 100 times during the festive period, making it the most broadcast on the list.
Other popular franchises include Home Alone, the Indiana Jones series and Harry Potter.
Paddington is the up-and-comer, with his two feature films played 11 times collectively across the five terrestrial channels in the past five years.
The analysis also shows that films scheduled for Christmas tend to be award-winning, with more than half of those scheduled across 50 years backed with prizes.
But highly acclaimed films have even become more common in recent years, with one in three films shown on TV over Christmas in the past decade having received an award. So you are very likely to watch a good film this Christmas, albeit one you have probably seen before.
The Guardian analysed nearly 4,200 movies broadcast on BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 scheduled between 20 December 1973 and 1 January 2023. Data was provided by the British weekly listings magazine Radio Times, via the Television and Radio Database (TVRDB) and the Guardian Guide.
