Welcome to the Holly Day Inn, a B&B so painfully English and old-fashioned that it’s run by Colin Baker, doesn’t even have a “computer site”, sits in lovely Cheddar Gorge, and based on its name, is situated in some sort of temporal limbo in which it’s Christmas year-round, which is probably some sort of time anomaly caused by the presence of The Sixth Doctor himself. It’s certainly Christmas time at the Holly Day Inn when we check in there for the duration of the film. But all is not well, for peace at the inn is threatened a tough-guy property developer (Philip Martin Brown) who looks and talks like he belongs in one of those cheap-n-nasty Brit gangster flicks you run across all the time on Netflix, Prime and down your local disreputable cornershop. He wants to demolish the inn because he stands for money and soulless modernity and has no warmth in his heart. My approach would be to simply buy out Colin Baker; surely he’d take a million. Two million? Ten million? Look, if he’s utterly unwilling to negotiate, I’d just find some land nearby for my development. But instead, he sends along a lackey, Kevin Leslie, to carry out some industrial sabotage. What kind of secrets is he hoping to discover from an unassuming local b&b? Maybe there’s some kind of sinister reason that the locals use clunky Americanisms like “cookie” and “vacation” Is he going to discover Colin Baker’s budding relationship with Anita Dobson from EastEnders? She tells Colin she’s “had a crush on him since college”, because that’s how English ladies in their 70s speak. Can this somehow be used as blackmail material?
Or, will he romance Baker’s daughter, Tamla Kari, in the process discovering the true meaning of Christmas and turning away from his life of wickedness and preferring secular holidays like the heathen New Year’s or the positively pagan Hallowe’en? Am I the sort of sucker who’ll watch any old rubbish if it has a former Doctor Who in it? What does it say about the film that what really stood out to me was the beautifully crunchy foley work when characters bite into biscuits or walk across gravel? You’ll have to watch to find out.