By Stephanie King

Every so often a song comes along that is so horrifying it is impossible to ignore. Like watching a dog take a crap on the street, despite all your better instincts, you find you have no choice but to notice it. Take Taio Cruz and Ke$ha’s Dirty Picture - truly the Ashley Cole of love songs.

It opens with the sort of faux-romantic crooner intro used to brilliant effect in Ne-Yo’s Closer, promising an upbeat, tacky floor-filler. But where Closer is the musical equivalent of a cheap takeaway (rubbish but enjoyable), Dirty Picture is like the after-effects, inspiring queasiness and disgust.

A lone male vocal bewails the absence of his love while a generic euro-dance backing builds behind the tiresome melody. I could dream of ways to see you/I could close my eyes to dream, swoons Taio. So far, so trite – but hardly exceptional in its awfulness.

The video shows Taio driving pensively through huge expanses of the American desert, posing moodily in front of an expensive car. One might almost be forgiven for expecting something cheesy and wholesome à la Enrique Iglesias. But as the trashy beat builds, Taio’s grubby insistence on receiving a shoddy, blurry camera-phone picture of some girl’s bits grows hungrier. Eew.

And here’s where the song gets really offensive. The main pounding hook is lifted straight from a far superior track – Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction. A crass club classic, featuring farting electronica and a voice-box talking dirty to the woman who announces the stations on the tube, the video famously features St Tropezed, oiled honeys jiggling, bending and thrusting over the stock of B&Q. It’s so blatant and puerile, like Benny Hill on cocaine, that even a card-carrying, Nuts-hating feminist like me couldn’t help but be charmed.

To be reminded of such genius throughout such a turgid, flaccid excuse for a nasty pop song as Dirty Picture is a real slap in the face. Ke$ha’s snarling, squeaky vocal is backed by sighs and gasps that sound about as enjoyable as a tooth extraction. Meanwhile, watching Taio and Ke$ha feign arousal as they paw each other is about as risque as watching Cheryl Baker and Jay Aston getting their skirts pulled off in front of Terry Wogan.

In this song the repeated dirty picture refrain is just plodding, monotonous and lumpen. There’s nothing deliciously guilty about this song; it’s pure, sanitised, record company backwash. The video is painfully try-hard, with its gyrating supermodels sporting their fake tattoos. And every time I watch that silly Ke$ha woman teetering over that high-fashion club toilet, I just wish she would fall in.

Dirty, but not in a good way.