Several years ago, I noticed that most contemporary American movies contain a scene where a character vomits. This I found repellent. Every year I would write about this trend, in the hope that someone might realise that on-screen vomiting had become a cliche, and replace it with something classier and more dramatically cutting-edge, like ear-cleaning or nose-picking.

But this never happened. Cinematic nausea seems to be a staple of the art form now. It’s enough to make your stomach turn. My son and daughter, 23 and 21 respectively, having grown up in a culture of woeful onscreen hygiene, insist that my obsession with the putative ubiquity of celluloid regurgitation is fanciful and precious.

Last week, to prove them all wrong, I rented five movies, whose only common trait was that they looked as if they might be entertaining. Each time vomiting occurred; I strode into the living room and declared triumphantly: “Puking scene! Aha!” The fifth film I rented was The Good German, which is noticeably devoid of puke. On the other hand, it does contain a scene in which Tobey Maguire gets his face jammed into the toilet in retaliation for being insufficiently forthcoming to his interrogators. To me, any attempt to separate puking into a toilet bowl from getting your face stuffed into a toilet bowl is to draw a distinction without a difference. I am sure Tobey Maguire feels the same way.

By the time my unpleasant experiment was over, my family could no longer ignore the validity of my thesis. Its truth was further reinforced when my wife returned from a screening of I’m Not There. When asked if anyone puked, she curtly replied: “Of course. Cate Blanchett pukes. But you should have seen the instalment of House. One man started puking, and then the entire plane was puking.

So there you have it. They’re puking in award-winning Franco-Algerian films. They’re puking in mainstream films. They’re puking in Steven Soderbergh films, they’re puking in Korean horror movies, they’re puking in spellbinding indie features, and now they’re even puking in TV series. It’s starting to look like vomiting is getting completely out of hand. But maybe it’s just me.