7: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

Britain is, in many ways, a strange land. For example, most of us would barely shrug our shoulders if our next door neighbour was gored to death by a runaway fairground donkey. Yet we’re perfectly happy to elevate a pairing of plasticine man and plasticine dog to the status of beloved national treasures, slotting in somewhere between Sir Derek Jacobi and Dot Cotton from Eastenders.

The name of that man is Wallace. The name of that dog is Gromit. And having secured a deuce of Academy Awards for their short-form antics, they repeated the feat with their step up to feature length in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit – and all without mitigating the English eccentricity for which they (and their makers, Aardman Animations) are so well known. Bravo, squishy chaps.

6: Sightseers (2012)

Sightseers finds its writer-stars Steve Oram and Alice Lowe taking the esoteric oddity that is the caravan holiday and marrying it to a Bonnie and Clyde story, as dimwits Chris (Oram) and Tina (Lowe) discover that life isn’t actually as dull as it seems if you start offing all the snooty jerks you meet along the way.

Not an especially positive message admittedly, albeit one entirely assuaged by the fact director Ben Wheatley approaches the material with the same degree of realism you might expect from an episode of Roobarb and Custard. The cartoon kills are played purely for laughs, but there’s heart underneath the black comedy, as the two moronic kindred spirits spread the pain and feel the love.

5: Hot Fuzz (2007)

Having made a career to that point out of playing overgrown slackers, Hot Fuzz finally saw Simon Pegg break the casting mould, in order to take on the role of laserhead cop Nicholas Angel, dispatched from the big city to the back of beyond, where he hooks up with Danny (Nick Frost), a village bobby and – wouldn’t you just know it? – overgrown slacker.

Pitching Pegg and Frost against a murderous conspiracy, director Edgar Wright crafts a spot-on homage to/lampoon of buddy cop actioners. Meanwhile, an outrageously strong supporting cast including Edward Woodward and Timothy Dalton help conjure up the kind of big laughs that the Wright-Pegg-Frost axis’s latest, The World’s End, was so conspicuously short of.

4: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

By writing Danny Boyle’s London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, screen-scribe Frank Cottrell Boyce helped invent Britishness. The nation was able to feel proud of itself for the first time since the Battle of Trafalgar. Mr Bean made us laugh for the very first time since that 1976 Morecambe & Wise Christmas special watched by 200million people.

Actually, sod the Olympics. Cottrell Boyce’s finest contribution to British culture had come seven years earlier, with his script for Michael Winterbottom’s sort-of adaptation of Tristram Shandy. Featuring Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan unleashing competing Al Pacino impersonations (“That’s Columbo…”), A Cock and Bull Story is one of the funniest-ever movies about making a movie.

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