As a child, Aidan Smith was armed to the teeth with toy guns, but the army recruiters arrived too late

Carole Middleton has been giving us the benefit of her wisdom regarding Christmas and how to have simply the bestest and scrummiest one ever. The grandmother of the future king says you can’t have enough trees – 12 is a good number – and suggests a different wrapping paper theme every year. Mince pies, mulled wine and mistletoe are her “Christmas essentials” and, look, all three begin with the same letter! How clever is that?

Vital info, I’m sure you’ll agree, but what Carole doesn’t tell us is what the flipping hell you’re supposed to do if Where Eagles Dare can’t be found anywhere in the festive TV schedules. Now I should say I don’t know that the hoary Second World War movie classic isn’t being shown this year. All the advance publicity has been about the big shows, the plums in the pudding of the gormandiseful goggle-box feast. We don’t discover whether its Where Eagles Dare or The Heroes of Telemark or The Guns of Navarone this time round until we have the Radio Times double issue in our hands.

Or maybe 2018 will be when we get all three. Or possibly none of them. Recently a museum in Dumfries was obliged to remove a WW2 machine-gun from display following a single complaint from the public. The BBC and the other networks may decide this is too critically sensitive a moment in pan-continental relations for us to be seen to be glorying in an old victory, no matter that we had little option but to go to war with Germany.

Or indeed no matter that Where Eagles Dare is sometimes camp and often preposterous. That this was a time in Richard Burton’s career when he was putting away four bottles of vodka a day. That, having beat himself up for doing another lowbrow bullet-fest for the money, he would declare a war of his own, or an Olympics of Teutonic pronunciation officially open, and to Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson would snap: “‘Wehrmacht’ – beat that.”

You can tell, perhaps, that I’m a fan of Where Eagles Dare. That I’d cheerfully have it primetime pride of place on Christmas night. That I’d love to see Burton and Clint Eastwood storm the set of Michael Mcintyre’s Yuletide special – almost certainly the programme in possession of this slot – like it was the Nazi castle in the Bavarian Alps from where they rescue the US general. I reckon I’m as big a fan of the movie as Geoff Dyer, author of the funny and profound tribute Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, a book I wish I’d written myself.

Obviously I’m a fully paid-up pacifist nowadays, but like Dyer I was born right after the Suez Crisis when it was still all guns blazing in the martial pop-culture and every boy was a short-trousered warmonger, at least in his own head.

Guns? I had loads of ’em. I was armed to the teeth with the toy versions for any eventuality: Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, and Commandos versus the cunning forces of the Empire of Japan when it was an Axis Power, although that’s a more PC description of the latter struggle than the one used in my playground. I had cap guns, potato guns, ray-guns, guns concealed in Secret Sam attache cases, waterpistols, Wild West six-shooters, Winchester rifles, Lugers, James Bond Walther PPKS, Mauser C96s, Tommy guns, Sten guns, Bren guns and the type of shooter that Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E would rest on sidekick Napoleon Solo’s square shoulders to take out a red under the bed.