Peter Bradshaw: A Great Year for Films, So Why the Christmas Turkeys?

Do our national broadcasters have a patriotic duty to show more British films this Christmas? Speaking as someone who watches more British films than is strictly speaking good for me, my gut reaction is no.

We'll have enough turkey on our plates without having it on the telly as well. Most people reading this will not, for example, have seen Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War, a horribly twee British comedy that came out this year starring Pauline Collins and John Alderton, about a feisty lady packed off to an old people's home.

Then there was Shoreditch, starring Shane Ritchie and funded with a goodly wedge from Ritchie's own chequebook, a terrible time-slip thriller that I just don't want to think about.

And how about The Actors, starring Michael Caine and Dylan Moran, a comedy that made me want to put a brown paper bag over my head. I don't want to see them on TV at Christmas or any other time.

Yet we take a perverse pleasure in complaining about our homegrown films, and forget just how many well-regarded British films came out in 2003.

Calendar Girls and Love Actually were big box-office successes. Michael Winterbottom's In This World, a drama-documentary about refugees, won prizes and plaudits, as did Peter Mullan's harrowing UK-Ireland co-production The Magdalene Sisters.

There was David Mackenzie's Young Adam, starring Ewan McGregor, Hanif Kureishi's The Mother, and Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things. I Capture The Castle, starring Bill Nighy and Romola Garai was a very bright and attractive British movie, and the year ended with Kevin Macdonald's stunning climbing documentary Touching the Void.

Could more support from British TV help the industry, and boost more good films? Possibly. In France, for years, the Canal Plus television station has been a life-support machine for the French movie industry with a legal obligation to show an annual quota of indigenous material and spend a certain percentage of its turnover on French films.

But this was part of that country's bullish cultural protectionism, and it has now become criticised within France for feather-bedding a substandard product.

In Britain, the prevailing feeling is that our English-language advantage gives us a competitive edge without the need to skew the market, that a return to quotas would enervate and ghettoise British films, and there's support from the lottery anyway.

There is a case to be made, however, for a more supportive approach from TV. This year, a low-budget British film called The Announcement, with an American director but a British cast - including Fay Ripley, Toby Stephens and Tom Hollander - came out briefly in London cinemas and was largely overlooked.

But then it was bought by BBC3 and got rave reviews. It shows how television, with an imaginative attitude, can help. But the TV controllers surely have to be allowed to make these decisions themselves, without being coerced by politicians and cultural commissars.

Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic