Knights, princes and a Scottish castle: is this what women really want for Christmas? | Anne Billson

I've binged on Christmas romcoms to see exactly what modern-day fairytales are all about

Last week I suffered from film-induced whiplash. One minute I was watching Pablo Larrain's Spencer, in which Diana, Princess of Wales's last Christmas with the British royal family is like being trapped in a haunted mansion full of malevolent waxworks. The next, I was revelling in the adorable idiocy of The Princess Switch, in which a Chicago patisserie owner called Stacy swaps places with a lookalike duchess at Christmas, and falls in love with the Crown Prince of Belgravia.

We're not talking about the posh London district of the same name, but a fictional, Ruritania-style kingdom somewhere in the region of Romania, whose treasury must now be coining it from the number of Christmas romcoms being shot in and around its fancy castles.

Anne Billson is a writer and film critic