I beg to differ. It’s true that Vaughan Williams’s opening is hard to hum, but all that rapturous warbling issues eventually into a lovely swaying melody, soon followed by another more sturdy melody which is eminently hummable. It’s the way graspable form and melody emerge by degrees from airy nothings, and then melt back into them at the end, that for me makes the piece so masterly.

Nevertheless, some stinkers baffle me and make me reach for the off-button. What quality is it that brings on the “yuck” response? One is being annoyingly catchy: you know the piece is terrible, but you can’t get it out of your head. Another is over-familiarity, as another annoyed letter-writer, Cedric Harris, pointed out in the most recent Sunday Telegraph. “We have been brought “jollity”, in Holst’s ‘Jupiter’, at least 5,000 times. The other planets? Hardly ever. Similarly, we are subjected every couple of days to the same tired excerpts from Smetana, Beethoven, Greig and others.” I agree. Any piece becomes horrible if it’s forced on you often enough.

But the most grievous fault of the stinker is that it pretends to be more than it is. It cosies up to you, fluttering its eyelashes, and raises your hopes with a seductive beginning. Then instead of going somewhere interesting, it just “milks” that opening for all it’s worth. What I’m describing is sentimentality.

Not that I would want to damn everything that’s sentimental: the divide between the fake feelings of kitsch and sweetly sincere sentimentality is paper-thin. Nevertheless, I think there is a divide, and it’s one that matters – which is why I’m prepared to stick my neck out, and name 10 pieces in my own Hall of Shame, as an antidote to Classic FM’s Hall of Fame.

I can say, hand on heart, that I sincerely detest all of them. In at least two cases, I can bring an authoritative voice in support of my view: the composer himself. But I’m well aware you can’t prove that a piece is objectively bad; in the end, taste decides. So if you find one of your beloved favourites in my Hall of Shame, don’t be too offended…

1. Maurice Ravel: Boléro

Yes, I know it’s (sort of) sexy, and the orchestration is brilliant, especially that bit where Ravel offers an uncannily accurate imitation of an organ-stop. But it’s also interminable. As the composer put it, “I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.” You said it, Maurice.

2. Henry Litolff: Concerto Symphonique No 4, second movement (Scherzo)

You’ve never heard of it? Lucky you. This gleefully cheerful little number was inescapable a few decades ago, though it has now mercifully dipped. Like most stinkers it starts well, but when that annoying hamster-trapped-in-a-wheel tune comes round for the fifth time you’re screaming inside: Stop. Just stop.

3. Antonín Dvořák: New World Symphony, second movement (Largo)

It starts irresistibly, with that nostalgic tune on the deep oboe or cor anglais. You can practically smell the smoke from the camp-fire. But the feeble way in which the second phrase simply repeats, and then at the end the final phrase repeats at half-speed, is utterly lame and predictable.

4. Jules Massenet: Meditation from Thaïs

This sugary violin solo is meant to represent the pagan courtesan Thaïs’s miraculous conversion to Christianity, after her meeting with the monk Athanaël. I mean, come on. It’s musical soft porn – which is bad enough in itself, but soft porn dressed up as religiosity is really bad.

5. Edvard Grieg: Piano Concerto, second movement (Adagio)

I love Grieg, but sometimes his photo-shopped vision of Norwegian bucolic innocence makes my teeth grate, as in the second movement of his much-loved Piano Concerto. The solo piano gives us twee phrases and then soars to a twee little climax, as if it had just said something important. It’s emptiness on stilts.

6. JS Bach: Toccata in D minor

Is it unfair to damn this overblown, overplayed bit of organ Grand Guignol just because it was a favourite of horror film directors back in the day? Yes it is, though the association can’t be avoided. But it is unfair to blame Bach, because it may actually be by someone else.

7. JS Bach/Charles Gounod: Ave Maria

If the test for a Hall of Shame entry is, ‘Does it make me want to scream?’, Gounod’s crime against Bach passes with flying colours. He drapes a sugary and completely otiose melody over Bach’s beautifully chaste Prelude, and adds insult to injury by smoothing over Bach’s most surprising harmonic move.

8. Ludwig van Beethoven: Wellington’s Victory

The idea that Beethoven could feature in a Hall of Shame seems shocking. But he had to earn a crust, so you can’t blame him for glorifying Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Vitoria with a noisy musical battle of British and French national melodies. It’s embarrassing, as Beethoven himself admitted.

9. Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No 7 (‘Leningrad’)

The first movement contains an interminable crescendo, where the same banal little march is repeated over and over to symbolise the Nazi invasion of Russia. There’s a “revisionist” view which says that in the context of the whole symphony it’s a profound statement. Rubbish: musical emptiness doesn’t become full by being symbolically loaded.

10. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No 8

“What – all of it?” I hear you cry. Yes, all of it. Frankly, I could consign a good third of Mahler’s output to the Hall of Shame, but the Eighth is especially bad. So many hundreds of performers, so much sound and fury, so little actual music.