Christmas tradition in Britain means stuffing your face with so much food and booze that you fall asleep in front of the telly during the Queen's speech and snore your way through the Christmas movies until Boxing Day. But the simple pleasure of falling asleep while watching films is not just for Christmas.
Films are an art form that play an enormous cultural role in societies and facilitate essential social functions like romance (leading to reproduction), learning (facilitating knowledge), leisure (fundamental escapism) and collective emotional response (laughter, anxiety, tears, relief...) But sometimes films perform a more simple biological function: they aid a really good kip. (Which means sleep, in English.)
I've selected ten of the best films to fall asleep to this Christmas, or at any time of the year...
1. The Aristocats
Any Disney film really: Lady and the Tramp, Jungle Book, the early ones they show on Christmas Day... they're almost like sleeping pills. One of them is even called Sleeping Beauty! Aristocats wins because of the scene where the butler, Edgar, sedates the cat, Duchess, and her kittens, Berlioz, Toulouse and Marie, by putting sleeping pills in their food. Even the mouse has a nibble and nods out. Grab the duvet and sod off to noddy land.
2. Breakfast at Tiffany's
Watch it at an independent cinema in an affluent neighbourhood on a rainy Sunday while in a long-term relationship after an expensive pub lunch. You'll be spark out in no time, dreaming of cats getting wet in puddles. Alternatively, try it at Movietowne after a TGI Friday.
3. Lawrence of Arabia
Begins with a dreamlike sequence in which Lawrence is killed in a motorbike accident on a country lane in Oxfordshire. It's not jarring as it might sound, it's a muffled, somnambulic scene which sets the tone for a film with doses of humour, drama, battles and endless sand dunes inducing irresistible ennui. At four hours long it's an endurance test. I normally nod off when Peter O'Toole sings I'm The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo on a camel.
4. Any Cary Grant film
I've chosen Bringing Up Baby, one of my favourite films of all time. Regardless of its other qualities, its singular ability to cause drowsiness is impressive.
This is a Saturday morning film.
Get out of bed late, take your duvet to the couch and get lost in black and white celluloid. Grant's voice will lull you to sleep despite Katherine Hepburn's shrieking. He has one of those voices which could make even a truck driver on amphetamines fall asleep at the wheel. In spite of the slapstick humour and the massive leopard (the eponymous "Baby") it feels like the director was addicted to Valium.
5. Harry Potter
These films have no artistic merit and should never have been made. But they were made, sadly, and they're interminably dull. You'll fall asleep involuntarily as a kind of unconscious individual silent protest.
6. Octopussy (or any Roger Moore era Bond film)
Great title but a snore of a Bond film in many ways. It was Moore's penultimate outing and ends with him dressed-up as a clown at a circus after a hairy train ride. By that point it's become quite confused and in all honesty you'll never make it that far. There's a scene where Bond is served a stuffed sheep's head and the baddie pops out the sheep's eyeball and munches on it. It's quite awful but you won't see it: you'll be asleep. The film's saving grace is the opening song, All Time High. I first watched it on a National Express coach as a child in the mid 80s. I got halfway through, then dozed off even though I was a Bond fanatic at the time.
7. Pirates of the Caribbean
I've never seen this film all the way through, nor any of the subsequent remakes. After half an hour something deep inside me shuts down and I literally don't give a s--t what happens next.
8. Out of Africa
"I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills," narrates Meryl Streep at the beginning of this Oscar-laden film in which she plays a Danish woman who marries a Danish aristocrat but ends up banging Robert Redford, as you do. Those opening lines are so hypnotically recited you're yawning from the outset. As a child I recorded the SuperBowl over our family copy of Out Of Africa when we ran out of blank tapes. When they discovered what I'd done they were understandably quite angry.
9. Star Wars
Any film shown on Saturday afternoon television is nap fodder, but Star Wars really takes the biscuit with its bleeping noises, rubbish set pieces, awful special effects, cuddly ewoks and impenetrable plots. I've never known what's going on and I've never cared. The prequels are even more soporific than the originals. Ja Ja Binks, in particular, sounds like he just wants to have a spliff and kotch under a palm tree.
10. Dr Zhivago
If anybody has ever watched this film in its entirety, please write in. You deserve some sort of prize. A collection of short films perhaps.