Richard Lutz  plunders the Christmas listings to find a gem of a movie on the box this week.

Let’s get past some masterpieces of pre-Yuletide garbage on tv such as The Christmas Heart, Mistletoe over Manhattan and The Real St Nick (and that’s only in single stream of gooey rubbish on one single channel).

Let’s get to a good film. And they come no better, in glorious post-war black and white, than The Lavender Hill Mob. (Thurs; Film4; 15.05)

This isn’t, by the way, the Coen Brothers hash of a re-make with Tom Hanks. No, this is the original 1951 model, the all British cast showing how there is fun in the wreckage and coaldust of London crawling away from the horror of the war.

And a nice cast it is too. Alec Guinness is a timid bank clerk called Holland who enlists Stanley Holloway, Sid James and Alfie Bass to steal gold bullion. The streets of London are empty, the skeletons of shattered buildings and ghostly building lots studding the city locations.

Do Guiness and pals succeed? Well (spoiler alert) no. Because Ealing Studios realised if the bumbling bad guys don’t get nicked, the film would not get an American release. And that would blow a hole in profits.

But who cares? The plot, though fun, reveals a little episode in British film history. Director Chatles Crichton wanted an iota of realism so Ealing contacted the Bank of Engand which devised the bullion robbery. What you see on screen i is what bank bosses felt was a crime that would work.

Nice…maybe Hollywood could do that today and ask RBS or Lloyds thieves how too get rich by stealing from you and me.

There is an early film appearance for future tough guy Robert Shaw. And a cute hello from ingenue Audrey Hepburn who, in 1951, was noticed by Guinness who had her deposited  in the comedy as a walk-on South American nightclub dancer.

it is all jolly stuff. Slap it on the hard drive and play it on a rainy day to see how Crichton and writer T.E.B. Clarke structured comedy without sex, CGI, toilet jokes or manic boom-boom punchlines.