King Kong Merrily on high!

From 'tis the season: a humourous review of movies that get shown on TV this time of the year.

I'm encouraged to see that King Kong seems to have taken the box offices in various countries by storm, because it reaffirms the true meaning of Christmas - big monkeys.

Oh alright, not big monkeys. But there's a certain synergy to be seen between the festive season and larger-than-life (if less-than-believable) cinematic romps.

We've come to expect that the TV schedule over these dark winter weeks will be peppered with feature-length offerings aimed squarely at that family-having-overeaten-and-being-slightly-irritable-but-nevertheless-thinking-they-ought-to-spend-some-time-together audience. Old, new, half-cocked and badly-animated: with the plethora of channels now available to the modern viewer, there's room for all those classics to make their annual reappearance in the schedules, however lame and/or bad.

To keep you right on the button over the next couple of weeks, here's your handy cut-out-and-keep rundown to what you can expect from the various festive favourites, which has in no way whatsoever been rapidly dredged out without reference to accuracy or detail from my increasingly hazy memory. At all.