Presents from across the sea

From England, land of Charles Dickens, the wassail bowl and figgy pudding, come two TV movies imported for your pre-Christmas pleasure by BBC America. One tends toward the ridiculous, the other the sublime. The first is not bad, and the second is very good.

Airing tonight is “Christmas Lights,” a light entertainment about envy that drapes itself in tinsel, holiday music, winter weather and the eponymous colorful illumination and delivers holiday-appropriate messages about family and friendship, of which it boldly declares itself to be in favor. It was a huge success in Britain, where it garnered a 42.7 share when it aired last December -- a Christmas miracle now beyond the dreams of even the most credulous American network executive. In case there is any doubt as to its being a holiday film, it ends with a Christmas message literally writ across the screen.

Robson Green and Mark Benton play competitive best friends and next-door neighbors, married to sisters and working at a delivery service; each believes the other’s grass is greener, but (this being Christmas) they will eventually discover not only that their own grass is green enough, but also that it is especially green where their grasses overlap (metaphorically speaking, of course). Benton seems like the sad sack at first and Green the smooth operator, but when Benton is promoted into management, Green’s surprise and resentment spark an escalating rivalry -- its most visible representation a series of ever more elaborate holiday displays. (The film takes place across three yuletides.)

David Sedaris wrote a far more extravagant and darker fantasia on the same theme, and though Green and Benton go to unlikely extremes, the film remains relatively credible and gets mileage from homey detail and fine performances. Green, best known in the U.S. for such dark and stylish British cop shows as “Second Sight” and “Wire in the Blood,” is something of a novelty here as a working stiff and family man, and as his wife, Nicola Stephenson does as much as anyone involved to make the piece real. Its climax is a thing of soap opera crises and predictable resolutions, but they are crises at least of the sort that many people undergo here on the actual Earth.

Saturday’s “Mr. Harvey Lights a Candle,” on the other hand, is not a Christmas movie per se -- it premiered in Britain in March -- though lighting a candle is a Christmassy thing, and its last half is set in Salisbury Cathedral. But it is about God, if not necessarily the one called Jesus, and the intersection of the secular and the spiritual, of the material and the metaphysical, which is both discussed and shown with more than usual intelligence. (Stonehenge makes a cameo too, sitting surprisingly close to the motorway.) Writer Rhidian Brook, a BBC commentator on religion and ethics and the author of the faith-issue novels “Jesus and the Adman” and “The Testimony of Taliesin Jones,” is a believer, but he hasn’t written a tract here. This is more a story of human contact than of divine grace, though Brook might argue those aren’t separate things.

Timothy Spall, familiar to the art-house crowd as a member of the Mike Leigh repertory company and to millions more as Peter Pettigrew in the “Harry Potter” movies, and an exceptionally good actor, is Mr. Harvey, the organizer of a high school class trip to Salisbury Cathedral. From the minute he pats his jacket pocket carefully during the opening credits, we know that Mr. Harvey has an ulterior motive, and soon enough we know this has something to do with his wife and that she is no longer in the picture. Just why she’s not, though, is the film’s big revelation, but you will have worked it out before you are told.

Spall is not the sort of actor you are likely to see at the center of a modern American TV movie; he is not lovely enough. (Charles Laughton, another Englishman, is the Hollywood actor he most resembles.)

His Mr. Harvey, awkward and inward, is a figure of behind-the-hand derision, whose students call him, ironically, “Mr. Happy,” and whose colleagues can’t quite make him out either. But he is not the only misunderstood person in this movie, and it’s his collision with another such, the excellent Natalie Press (“My Summer of Love”), that is its tinder.

Press, playing the “tart” who’s sadder and deeper than she seems, is one of several high school drama types on display here. There’s also the self-obsessed handsome boy who takes advantage of her; the quiet strange lad derided by his peers (for his being an observant Muslim); the vandal with an artistic soul; the late-maturing dopey Gang of Three. But Brook’s dialogue rings true, and the acting is excellent all around. And director Susanna White has made sure that even the corners are filled with convincing juvenile activity.

“Something always goes wrong on school trips -- it’s a law,” says bus driver David Bradley. (He’s another actor familiar from the “Harry Potters” movies, in which he plays school caretaker Argus Filch -- but, then, what British character actor isn’t?) And something does, of course, but it all ends tidily, and a little too easily, perhaps. But the whole thing is executed with such life and conviction that you’re happy to submit, even to be moved.

*

‘Christmas Lights’

Where: BBC America

When: 6 and 10 tonight

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Robson Green...Colin

Mark Benton...Howie

Nicola Stephenson...Jackie

Maxine Peake...Pauline

Executive producers Jeff Pope, Bob Mills and Andy Harries. Writers Bob Mills and Jeff Pope. Director Paul Seed.

*

‘Mr. Harvey Lights a Candle’

Where: BBC America

When: 5 p.m. Saturday

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Timothy Spall...Mr. Harvey

Celia Imrie...Miss Davies

Ben Miles...Mr. Cole

Natalie Press...Helen

Executive producers Hilary Salmon and Laura Mackie. Writer Rhidian Brook. Director Susanna White.