2006’s Starter For Ten is a relatively undemanding coming-of-age comedy that is as quintessentially British as they come. It’s not massively original and a little too content to indulge in clichés throughout. Also, the cast playing the supposedly first-year university students are all, quite evidently, in their mid-twenties.
However, the notion of basing the plot around the long-running TV show, University Challenge, does render the film a little more interesting. Strong performances from a very decent cast, and jokes which are, for the most part, pretty funny, also elevate the movie to something greater than it might otherwise have been.
Score for Christmasishness
Like many movies which make the cut in my annual festive countdown, Starter For Ten is not explicitly a Christmas movie, but the Christmas period does feature fairly heavily in the narrative and takes up a reasonable percentage of the running time. This is definitely a film which embraces its Christmasishness.
James Proclaims! 