Around this time of year TV schedules groan under a blizzard of feel-good festive movies, all of which share essentially the same plot: a hard-charging corporate bigwig burnt out on life in the city returns home to Middle America for Christmas, where they learn important life lessons from folksy neighbours, fall in love with the quirky owner of a coffee shop, and use their business nous to save the local factory from closure. Eventually everyone gathers around an oversized Christmas tree and pretends to sip eggnog from patently empty mugs. The credits roll and so do our eyes.

Alan Cumming seems to have stumbled into a real-life version of this plot. The New York City based actor, best known for his roles in the early-2000s Spy Kids franchise, is back in Scotland to take up the artistic directorship of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre. He’s launched a new festival called Out in the Hills, a programme of exhibitions and performances which ‘celebrates all things LGBTQIA , and invites everyone to find new ways to look at the world and each other.’ Residents of Pitlochry, a sleepy Perthshire town of under 3,000, many of them retirees, will certainly experience a new way of looking at the world. Their preferred pastimes are typically golf and fishing, not queer performing arts.

Come January, they will be treated to Camp Trans Scotland, an exhibition that ‘leads the audience into a time and space built on and by nature, community care and trans ancestry.’ We’re about to find out the Picts were non-binary, aren’t we? The exhibition ‘takes us far from the demands of cis society,’ and will ‘restore the strength to face the relentless attacks on trans people.’ You can hardly walk the length of Atholl Road without encountering a gender-critical street gang.

For fans, or perhaps enemies, of Arthurian legend there will be

© The Spectator