“IT’S THE FEEL-GOOD Brit Flick of the year!” Are there any words more likely to inspire abject terror in the heart of the seasoned cinemagoer? Is there a sentence more self-defeating? A promotional concept more redundant? Close your eyes and listen again: the feel-good Brit Flick of the year. What do you see? A small provincial town? Yes. A working-class town? Better! A working-class town in crisis? Excellent! Now describe what ’s happening. They’re overcoming their personal, political and socio-economic problems through the rejuvenating power of dance? No, too tame. Overcoming their problems through the power of stripping? Getting warmer.

Through the power of cross-dressing? Yes! You’ve just described the plot and story structure of Kinky Boots, a new home-grown comedy about a London transvestite saving a crippled Northampton shoe factory — a film that wears with pride, in posters and TV adverts, the emetic legend: “It’s the feel-good Brit Flick of the year!” Against all odds, the FGBF has become a national cinema.

The Germans have given us the paranoid depths of Expressionism, the Italians created Neo-Realism, the French have perfected brooding Melodramatic Existentialism, while the British bask in the bathetic glow of a plucky little yokel, a couple of nude scenes and a happy-clappy sing-song finale.

Calcified by cliché from the moment of its inception in the mid-1990s, manifested in The Full Monty and Brassed Off, the FGBF was originally defined by the schizophrenic ability to describe an optimistic new Labour nation while referring back to the traditional values of an Ealing Comedy past: Alexander Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore!, from 1949, is the Brit Flick comedy template.

Since then the genre has become an unstoppable tsunami of sentiment, producing unthinking, hugely anachronistic tales about the triumph of small-town life in the face of modernity. Films like Billy Elliot, There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble, Very Annie Mary (note the appealingly inoffensive proper nouns, like rustic friends you might have one day), Saving Grace, Little Voice, Calendar Girls and On a Clear Day are all rigidly tied to a formula that celebrates gifted protagonists who triumph over adversity with the aid of close-knit communities.

And yet it’s not the tyranny of formula that brings the entire genre into disrepute (all movies are steeped in formula) but the deluded approach to national identity. This consistently popular genre, after all, is one of the cultural conduits through which the nation speaks to itself, and to the larger world. More precisely, it is part of the machinery that helps to construct what the academic historian Benedict Anderson calls the “imagined community” of a modern British nation.

Thus the very existence and continued commercial success of the genre begs the question: why are these films so wilfully misrepresentative of the country they supposedly describe? And why does their wholesale denial of the social and political complexities of contemporary British life continue to resonate with cinemagoers? Fortunately, another forthcoming FGBF, Mrs Henderson Presents, has the answers. The movie, about the history of the Windmill Theatre in Soho and the country’s first naked revue show, is the apotheosis of the FGBF, and not just because it stars Judi Dench, features comedy nudity, touches lightly on gender issues and features regular song’n’dance numbers.

No, Mrs Henderson Presents is the essential FGBF simply because it is set during the Second World War. Whereas the movies that have preceded it have consistently traded on quaint and homely wartime values and the myth of a nation of villagers and shopkeepers under threat from a malign external force (for Hitler, read unemployment), Henderson is the logical conclusion of this process. By rooting itself in the war years it has direct access to the great sacrosanct tenets of British national identity — the Blitz spirit, the myth of the happy few and the idea of a nation of undiluted Anglo-Saxon purity bound together in common cause. Ultimately, the wartime setting makes explicit what has always been implicit in the genre — namely, that “Britain” is a place from the past.

It’s no wonder, then, that the FGBF is terrified by modern realities. It tentatively flirts with difficult issues such as race, gender roles and sexuality, yet it does so merely for narrative frisson and is quick to reassert the power of tradition and to subsume all unresolved conflicts into the high-spirits finale. Thus the miner’s strike in Billy Elliot is forgotten in the face of Billy’s closing Swan Lake stage dive. In The Full Monty the strippers are still unemployed even as their thongs fly through the air. And at the end of Kinky Boots, conflicted transvestite Lola/Simon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is no less enlightened about his identity crisis, but he gets to perform some infectious show tunes. In each case cinemagoers leave with smiles on their faces and the entirely erroneous belief that they’ve just witnessed a film about modern British life.

Which is not to say that every British film needs to be Nil By Mouth. Or that Ken Loach should start making provincial stripping comedies. It merely seems that in an age when even Tory politicians are looking to the future, it could be time for the country’s most notable film genre to take note. And if it does, it might not be long before we have a commercial form that can sweetly articulate the pressing issues of the day instead of perpetuating the myths, to paraphrase Yeats, of a nation that does not exist, a nation that is but a dream.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone