"The public has finally succumbed to fantasy fatigue" Fantasy has lost its power, writes Donald Clarke

Round these parts, we don't have much time for the ghastly Gillian McKeith. The waiflike pseudo-physician's belief that a brief rummage through her subject's excrement will reveal all there is to know about heart, brain and liver somewhat compromises her claims to be taken seriously as

a nutritionist. Still, the McKeith approach (soon to be banished from Channel 4, we are promised) does, at least, have some value as a metaphor.

What can we learn about cinemagoers' tastes from a glance at the larger logs left floating in 2007's loo bowl? Can last year's box-office turkeys - if you will excuse the shift from coprology to animal husbandry - tell us anything about the future direction of Hollywood?

Forget Evan Almighty. The summer's great catastrophe was already written off as a flop before it got within yawning distance of a cinema. Support for Bruce Almighty, its predecessor, was, to use the language of psephologists, wide but shallow: a great many people saw the thing, but relatively few were more than modestly amused by it. When the film-makers failed to interest Jim Carrey in returning for the sequel, the ruinously expensive farce may as well have climbed into the grave and prepared itself for the first spade-load of earth.

Nor does the much-discussed failure of films based around the war on terror tell us much. Lions for Lambs, Rendition, The Kingdom: these pictures were simply not good enough to provide a reliable test of the public's tolerance for dramas examining the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What about the audience's cursory dismissal of the excellent The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? Well, westerns are about as saleable as medieval mystery plays these days. So, again, that tells us little we didn't already know.

No. The year's most interesting underperformance was, surely, that by The Golden Compass. Though the ho-hum adaptation of Phillip Pullman's mighty Northern Lights held its own in Europe, it conspicuously failed to secure a foothold at the US box office. Consider the earlier failures of

The Dark Is Rising (Christopher Eccleston in a hoodie) and Eragon (Robert Carlyle in a Cher wig) and it becomes clear that, six years after The Lord of The Rings appeared to stake out ground for dragons and warlocks, the public has finally succumbed to fantasy fatigue. Fans of Norbert Mage's Serpent of Knob Gorge trilogy may have to wait a long time to see their heroes on screen.

The comparative failure of The Golden Compass may also finally confirm one unhappy fact to the men who run the movies: nobody likes Nicole Kidman. I exaggerate, of course. Chesney Spanglehat III, the country and western star to whom the Kidbot has been manacled for the past few years, presumably still enjoys oiling her joints and replacing her batteries. But, after such calamities as Fur, Bewitched, The Stepford Wives and The Invasion, the time has surely come for Ms Kidman to consider a change in career.

I believe Channel 4 is looking for a poo analyst.