The abandoning of core viewers, or film/TV triangulation

Apparently, viewers who really like Westerns despise the "hero's romance with hard-bitten saloon girl" plot. Earnest female teachers don't go down so well either. In fact, I've heard it said that the more women there are in a Western (I suppose we are talking women as love interests here, not Calamity Jane), the more rubbish it is. I've always found this view a little harsh, but I'm starting to understand it. I like romance. But I'm not the right audience for Westerns - in fact I find them mind-numbingly boring. By forcing in a bit of romance in between shoot-outs, face-offs and bar fights, the film-makers are trying to ingratiate themselves with viewers that don't really like Westerns much to the detriment of real Western fans who want tough-guy action, not a lot of sissy cooing. The reason I'm beginning to see their plight is because now it's happening to us rom-com and costume-drama lovers.

It started with the rom-coms. I've not seen a decent one in ages, and that's because so many of the rom-coms who are released now have an ingredient I just can't abide - "gross-out" comedy. This basically means toilet humour, plus jokes about all other kinds of disgusting bodily functions and body fluids you can think of. How did jokes that are primarily enjoyed by teenage boys end up in films primarily aimed at girls of all ages? There's a political concept called "triangulation", which officially means you position yourself between or above notions of left and right, but in practice tends to mean that you ditch your party's principles in order to poach voters from your opponent. "Triangulation" is great when your political enemies do it - sure, your side loses some votes, but it's worth it to hear your opponents recant on nearly every single thing they've championed for decades, if not centuries. And then, it starts to happen with your crowd, and suddenly it's not so fun anymore. The gross-out takeover of rom-coms is the film equivalent of political triangulation, and not a million miles away from the saloon girl strategy. As saloon girl romances are meant to draw in the wives and girlfriends of Western-loving men, so "gross-out" gags are meant to keep the boyfriends of chick-flick lovers happy and make those cinema outings with their gel less of an ordeal for them. The problem is, by courting the laddish vote, the cinema-goers are ruining rom-coms for those who really enjoy them and have always enjoyed them. I still haven't seen the hysterically praised Bridesmaids because there's reportedly a food-poisoning scene involving vomiting and diarrhoea in it. Seriously? They put a scene like that in a film about bridesmaids? And I haven't even mentioned the trend of letting the hero in these kind of films be a slacker or man-child with limited appeal to a female audience. OK, now I have.

This sort of strategy shouldn't work, really. Why should lads who enjoy gross-out jokes watch rom-coms when they can watch a similar comedy without too much silly love stuff in it? And why should real rom-com fans watch this kind of ghastly hybrid at all? The problem is, as in politics, giving your faithful followers a kick in the pants and pursuing their complete opposites seems to pay. Don't ask me why. Perhaps core viewers, like core voters, are loath to wander off: you'd rather vote for a party that is nominally or historically on your side rather than for one that has always considered you to be a first-class twit, and maybe the same applies to films. For my part, I'm boycotting gross-out rom-coms, and hoping enough rom-com lovers have the same idea until this awful trend finally stops.

Maybe it's paranoid of me to see a similar movement in the costume drama field. But consider the BBC's newest brain-child: Peaky Blinders, about British gangsters in the interwar years. Apparently, they had razors sewn into their flat-caps and could quite literally blind people with them. Now, I'm not saying that costume dramas are necessarily as much of a chick thing as rom-coms, but what with these gangsters, sooty mills and muddy villages, it does seem as if the current trend is for everything that does not appeal to the average fan of Jane Austen dramatisations and Andrew Davies's adaptations of Bleak House and Little Dorrit.

Is it any wonder that I - and many with me - obsess about Downton? That we're waiting impatiently for the new series for the same amount of time than it takes to have a baby,or even longer (in Sweden, we won't get it until November at the earliest, and the poor Americans don't get to see it until January)? Just what or who is going to replace it in our affections? Some bleedin' geezer with a razor in his cap?