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Ten Things That Got Old Really Fast In 2010

• 1st Dec 2010

Now that it's December it's time for some end of year round ups. So here is my top ten things that got old really fucking fast in 2010.

10. Dizzee Rascal – Don't get me wrong, I love grabbing the seat of my trousers and boasting about being “the boom ting, more than a hotel room ting” just as much as the next man. But in 2010 Dizzee officially jumped the shark, then kicked it and whizzed in its cold black eyes. Whether doing an impression of an overexcited eight year old at a school dance, running around buzzed on fizzy laces yelping “discodiscodisco!”, or that talent judging show with Cullum the professional jazz hobbit and Trent Reznor, or being easily the most appalling component of the entire England football World Cup campaign, Dylan Mills needs to take his own advice and spend 2011 on holiday before we crack and split his head like barnarnar.

9. Michael Cera – I love Michael Cera. I really do. The Arsene Wenger faced actor starred in one of my favourite TV shows ever and certainly one of my favourite films this year. However, for his sake if he appears in one more low-key smug-soundtracked “indie” movie about an insecure, awkward guy struggling with a break up while listening to Ben Folds and learning to love again I AM GOING TO RIP HIS COTTON HAIR OUT. Nevermind the fact that there is literally no way anyone is ever going to believe he has sex the normal way when he clearly asexually splits into multiple Ceras. Scott Pilgrim and Youth In Revolt were forays into hitherto uncharted territory but the guy needs to start playing proper adults, and not in a “Nick and Norah: Ten years later” Before Sunset way.

8. Chillwave – The audio equivalent of a massive “fuck off about whatever you are saying noooow” yawn. Mostly comprising boy/girl duos who possess a cassette of The Cure's early singles and a battered VHS of “The Breakfast Club”, or a solo fella in an offensive jumper who couldn't decide between a laptop and an acoustic guitar so bought both. In 2010 you have to tiptoe around the internet for fear of stumbling across yet another of their polaroid-coloured blogs. Chillwave, like all half-arsed, half-baked, unneccessary sub-sub-genres, has accidentally spawned the odd lovely song – Best Coast's 'Boyfriend', Summer Camp's 'Ghost Train' and Memory Tapes' 'Bicycle'. However, for every xx there are about a million with confectionary shoegaze names like Silver Inuit, Quill Feather and Toffee Echo singing about their cat, who make choking to death on a pillow a more enticing proposition.

7. People who moan about Hollywood remakes – Seen Let The Right One In? Or Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Want people to know how awesome you are? Then loudly complain how there's no way an American remake can possibly be any good ever, regardless of personnel or, you know, evidence. Let Me In was quite fantastic, but the fact that it has the temerity to be in a language that 2 billion people can speak means its makers receive the sort of ire usually reserved for people who throw their pets in the recycling. Newsflash: SCARFACE WAS A REMAKE YOU UTTER UTTER DICKS. SO WAS HEAT. AND THE DEPARTED. I could go on, or you could fuck off.

6. Vampires – Despite the aformentioned Let Me In being all kinds of aces, its not so much flogging a dead horse as feasting on it, reanimating it as a vampire horse and then serving it a garlic nosebag. When the geniuses behind Meet The Spartans and Epic Movie decide to cast their sharp-as-scrambled-egg satirical eye on you, then you know your goose is cooked. There's surely only so many emo 15 year old girls who still find this shit interesting in a vaguely sexually threatening way, and they're bound to lose interest when they realize R-Patz is hung like a Ken doll.

5. iPhones – If you have ever found yourself on a bus, train, alone in a bar or even on the toilet, and involuntarily pulled out this tosspot gauge to Twitter what you're up to, please smash yourself in the face with it right now. Pretend you're an angry bird and the phone is a green pig if that makes it any easier.

4. Olly Murs – Like Will Mellor and Peter Andre before him, Murs seems intent to build a career on a ready-made willingness to remove his tshirt. Which is probably designed to distract from the fact that his faux-ska-indie music is fucking guff. That he genuinely seems to regard Robbie Williams as someone to aspire to says more than I ever could.

3. Music festivals – Once upon a time, these were the Holy Grail of coolness. Guys with big hair in the same tshirt for 3 days, girls in shorts and tiny wellies, the possibility of seeing an unnanounced Primal Scream / Chemical Brothers collaboration on a side stage at 3am and the willingness to smoke anything as long as you can fit it in a rizla. Now it's all refreshing Internet Explorer to buy one of the 7 tickets that Seatwave don't snaffle up before 9.01am, groups of lads in top buttons throwing piss like its confetti and Pixie fucking Lott. When did the music festival become an outdoors extension of a Liquid nightclub?

2. Harry Potter – Now on its 38th instalment, and an object lesson in how much less cute it's possible to get over the course of 5 years. Each successive film comes with the warning “oh it's darker than the last one, oh it's really dark, it's darker than Darth Vader's bedroom”, although we've been told this so many times that by now you half expect next year's long-overdue final film to make Irreversible look like Alvin and the fucking Chipmunks. How dark can a film about a wizard at school with a pet owl be anyway? It's not like it ends with Lord Voldemort skullfucking Dobby the house elf while Ginny Weasley looks on in tears is it?

1. Stand up comedy – Turn on your TV. Now change to a random channel. And again. And one more time. You have probably already stumbled across 16 different shows where some offensively shirted mid-thirties gents take it in turns to cast a “wry, sideways look” at the weeks events. Whether it's boiled-egg doppelgänger Andy Parsons, 70s throwback John Bishop, hyperactive twelve year old Russell Howard, professional joke thief Reginald D Hunter, hen night compere Patrick Kielty or smug Rob Brydon with his magic regenerative hair, they've all got their own half hourly platform to spout their identically inane opinions (“David Cameron has a big face! Louis Walsh is Irish! Susan Boyle is unattractive!”), occasionally being awarded their own vanity shitcom that costs roughly 200% the entire TV licence contribution of Swindon. And THEY'RE ALL SHIT. All of them. Unless their name happens to be Stewart Lee, which not many of them are. Can anyone really, honestly tell the difference between Jack Whitehall and Russell Kane? Or Lee Mack and Rhod Gilbert? Or Ed Byrne and Andrew Maxwell? Or Tim Vine and your uncle? Now that tubby, chummy Jason Manford has decided that his ridiculous One Show wage wasn't really enough and he would quite like to be Mark Owen actually, it seems that this pissed-up clique of attention-seeking, dick-swinging Edinburgh chancers are actually starting to believe the whole “comedy is the new rock n roll” thing. It cannot go on. Let's get them all inside Michael McIntyre's travelling Apollo roadshow and blast it the fuck into space.