It’s Valentine’s Day, but I’m in no mood to celebrate. Why? Because love is dead. Or, more specifically, one of the greatest loves of my life: the rom-com. We haven’t had a good one for years, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. What do I have to do, go to Richard Curtis’s house with this column written on cue cards, playing Silent Night on a portable CD player? I’m willing to do it.
I know, I know, there have been some great small-screen rom-coms of late. Rose Matafeo’s wonderful Starstruck wears its love of the genre on its sleeve, and Catastrophe brilliantly dared to look at what happens after the — in this case, very haphazard — meet-cute. But what I’m talking about are the old-fashioned big-screen rom-coms, where incredibly beautiful people without real jobs fall in love, usually while it’s raining or they are standing in a bookshop that sells only travel books.
I’ve been trying to work out who killed it. Was it when the adaptation of David Nicholls’s One Day turned out to be deeply mediocre (Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent can’t shoulder the blame alone), or was it Ed Sheeran’s cameo in the third Bridget Jones film? Was it when Hugh Grant decided to become a serious actor?
Or maybe it wasn’t the rom-coms that changed. Maybe it was us. I’ll admit that I went through my own phase of feeling jaded by rom-coms, unable to ignore the questions they raised, like: how does Andie MacDowell afford all those big hats? If Emma Thompson is such a huge Joni Mitchell fan, wouldn’t she already have the album Alan Rickman bought her for Christmas? And would Rachel McAdams really want to be married to Domhnall Gleeson if she knew he was manipulating her through time travel?
But sheer logic aside, I get it. There’s nothing more passé than loving a straight white man (“hi” to my fiancé), and, clearly, stories that suggest finding a guy will bring women ultimate fulfilment now look embarrassingly archaic. We’re undoubtedly richer for the fact more challenging and complex roles are now written for women, and we’re much more thoughtful about sexual politics. And it’s also true that, traditionally, rom-coms have been incredibly white, posh and heteronormative. But doesn’t have to be the case — the plot, after all, is just two people realising they fancy each other (while having to overcome a series of obstacles).
I wonder if the main reason for our rom-com drought is also the same reason that I love them: fundamentally they are very silly. We’re living through a very serious age, and we think about things a lot and get grumpy about them. I think rom-coms are up to the challenge of becoming modern, and I think we need them to lift the clouds. So, Richard Curtis...say it’s carol singers?
In other news...
Louis Theroux provides a timely warning about far-right online misinformation
Did Louis Theroux give a platform to the far-Right by making a documentary about them? They wish. What they got instead was scrutiny, and they didn’t like it. In Extreme and Online, which aired on BBC Two last night, he asked his subjects incisive questions to try to understand the growth of this movement, all the while exposing the disturbing way it’s infecting mainstream politics by stealth.
His interviewees came across as pretty lame, but that lameness is a red herring. They couch everything in irony and humour, but dangerous ideas lurk beneath. And the fact that the Prime Minister repeated a false and toxic slur about Jimmy Savile, which originated in a dark corner of the internet, proves precisely why we can’t just ignore these people and hope they go away.
Do you miss rom-coms? Let us know in the comments below.
