What’s YOUR secret loathing?

Strawberries. Champagne. Just two of the ‘treats’ MARK MASON despises. So . . .

STrAWBErrIES. Ella Fitzgerald. Lying on the beach. They are three of my ‘guilty displeasures’. You haven’t heard of the guilty displeasure? That’s because the concept hasn’t been invented yet. But it needs to be — and quickly.

The phrase ‘ guilty pleasure’ is widely known. It was coined by the DJ Sean rowley, who applied a label to the songs we love despite them being uncool. The idea expanded and now anything naff can be a guilty pleasure: chocolate spread, crochet, Countdown, you name it.

But what about the opposite phenomenon, the supposedly cool things that we actually don’t like? When will we lift the social shame from admitting that something worshipped by everybody else just leaves us cold?

Strawberries, for instance. Underripe they are like bullets, overripe they are a cheap way of dyeing your clothes red, and for the 17 minutes in between they taste of not very much. Yet when I decline the offer of a bowl, people look at me as if I’ve touched their dog inappropriately.

‘You don’t like strawberries?’ they say. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

It’s the same with Ella Fitzgerald. Effortless panache, my eye. It’s simpering, ‘listen to me emoting’ fakery, the precursor of all those tedious modern singers who signal how serious they are by groaning ‘oooh’ 29 times over the intro.

Point this out, however,owever, and you are accused of being shallow. hallow. But I’ve got depth — which is why hy I can see that Ella Fitzgerald is spray-on on style for sales reps from Dorking.

As for beaches, what’s t’s the attraction? The he tiniest gust of wind nd and anything you’rere eating or reading getsets covered in sand. As dod you: the beach is a displeasure that at doesn’t just grate butut chafes. Yet for someme reason, saying so marks me as a nutter.r.

I also dislike cham- mpagne, which I thoughtht made me odd until lI I wrote an article about ut it and discovered that at lots of people agreeded with me. ‘Thank God,’ d,’ they said. ‘I thought t it was just me.’ It turns out that the champagne refusenik club includes the Queen.

No doubt you’ve got GDs of your own. A quick poll among friends produced ‘chocolate’, ‘Star Wars’, ‘ mayonnaise’ and, believe it or not, ‘sex’.

Everybody has these blind spots. With Stephen Fry it’s chips — he likes potatoes (mashed, boiled, whatever), just not chips. The film director Steven Spielberg dislikes coffee: he tried it once as a child and hasn’t touched a drop since. (Instead he drinks about a dozen cups of mint tea a day.)

BEINGconfident types who are used to having their voices heard, Fry and Spielberg find it easy to admit these things. It’s time the rest of us followed suit.

The fear of being different is first instilled in childhood. At the age of ten, I told our milkman I didn’t like Vimto.

‘What?’ he replied. ‘It’s my bestseller!’ After that he always regarded me with slight mistrust.

The really irritating thing about a GD is everyone else’s assumption that it’s a temporary foible from which you’ll soon recover.

A music journalist once confided to me that, unlike almost all his colleagues, he happened not to think DJ John Peel was God. It got on his nerves, he said, the reverential tone that draped itself over any conversation in which the ‘great man’ was mentioned.

I feel the same way towards Charlie Chaplin. He is always painted as an unarguable genius, a man who revolutionised cinema, a legend not just in his own time but for all time.

Only one problem with all this: he’s not funny. I don’t care how much he waddles or twitches his moustache or swings that flipping cane — he is not funny. Not to me, anyway. Yet my worship of his talent is taken for granted by every documentary or book that features him.

I’ve only known one other person brave enough to admit that Chaplin didn’t do it for him: Terry Wogan. Even then he had to approach the admission nervously, cringing as he readied himself for the cries of ‘how dare you?’ (Perhaps the ultimate modern GD would be Wogan himself — I loved him, like everyone else I know. But maybe you didn’t?)

A very particular sort of guilty displeasure is the one that forms a sub-section of something you do like. For me it’s The Thrill Is Gone by B.B. King. The guitarist was one of my heroes, and I went to see him in concert many times. But his greatest hit, the minor-key blues with which he finished every performance, just got on my nerves.

The gig would go brilliantly, his other songs bringing everyone, me included, to their feet — but all the time I knew The Thrill Is Gone was on its way. And of course, being his most famous song, it had to be played at great length, his solo at the end going on and on and on.

I could never admit that to the people around me. But this cowardly approach needs to end. We live in an age when the word ‘minority’ is the trump card in any debate, so surely guilty displeasures are a movement waiting to happen.

Come on: get out there — with your friends, down the pub, on Twitter — and nominate things you hate that you’re meant to love.

As well as my earlier suggestions I’m choosing Friends, Spitfire aeroplanes (in fact, World War II full stop), Julie Walters and fish (it smells like that and you’re meant to eat it?).

In the ‘great days out’ category I’m putting thick black lines through ‘the zoo’ and ‘the circus’ (in my book, anyone who dresses as a clown is simply asking for a swift right-hander).

As regards women I’m supposed to fancy, it’s no to Keira Knightley and the young Liz Taylor.

Meanwhile, back with music, one of my GDs has come full circle, having started, for most people, as a guilty pleasure.

It’s Abba. They were dire in the 1970s, they’re dire now, and Mamma Mia! turning up in the interim and ‘reinventing’ them doesn’t make them any less dire.

Like pleasures, displeasures are a matter of taste. They shouldn’t have to be guilt-edged. First published in The Spectator