We’re awash with the arts at this time of year – but what single piece means the most to you? We asked four personalities from different corners of British life – newsreader Julie Etchingham, former Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell, disability rights campaigner Sheila Hollins and writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce – for their choices, and why they made them. Plus, the season’s best theatre, classical music, TV and radio

Christmas is a time for giving, a time for family – and a time to reflect on how we are living our lives. Every year one movie gets me thinking about all this: It’s a Wonderful Life, the American comedy/drama directed by Frank Capra, which stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has decided to take his own life on Christmas Eve. Enter Clarence Odbody, played by Henry Travers; Clarence, his guardian angel, shows George the way the world would have been if he had never been born – how many lives he’s touched, and how much his community has been enhanced by having him in it.

It’s a poignant, clever, thought-provoking plot, and it centres on something we economists call the appropriate counterfactual. In other words, this is an experiment which shows what would have happened if one factor in a story was changed – in this case, the variable is George Bailey’s existence. The technique was used by Nick Crafts, one of our top economic historians, to look at what would have happened to the United Kingdom economy if we hadn’t joined the European Union – his conclusion was that our country’s gross domestic product is around 10 per cent higher than it would have been if the EU hadn’t been in the equation.