5 Reasons Why... Robbie leaving Take That again is a national tragedy.

1.       Without him, they are a charisma black hole. We all saw Gary’s innate tediousness on X Factor. Howard Donald gives Ed Sheeran a run for his money in the bore stakes, which is saying something since Sheeran’s head looks like it’s being crushed by the sheer weight of his dullitude and his eyes appear to be attempting to crawl off opposite sides of his face and leap onto someone more interesting. Robbie once managed to reduce a friend of mine to tears simply appearing on Top of the Pops and doing that thing where he spins the microphone round in one hand. Jason of Orange couldn’t do that. He’d drop it and then write an apologetic note to the sound guy saying sorry for not treating his equipment with respect.

2.       Robbie’s mini-set was the best bit of their gigs last year. It takes something extraordinary to upstage a 60 foot tall robot called Om and the sight of Jason Orange riding a unicycle, but introducing Robbie back into the band by giving him 15 minutes in which to stick a rocket under proceedings and tremble the knees of tens of thousands of mums was a masterstroke. If there’s a better five-song set than ‘Let Me Entertain You’, ‘Rock DJ’, ‘Come Undone’, ‘Feel’ and ‘Angels’, I’ll eat my hat (it’s a hat made of nachos so I will quite happily be proven wrong here).

3.       Staying with ‘the lads’ might stop him making more of his own albums. Since Escapology, his career’s been an unmitigated stink-fest. Rudebox sounds very much like the work of a man who at roughly the same time went crackers, grew a massive beard (sure sign of madness and loneliness – see below) and decided to hunt UFOs.

4.       Progress wasn’t half bad. By some distance Take That’s best album since the glory days, Progress was a thumping, techno-flavoured addition to the Take That oeuvre, and in ‘The Flood’ boasts both a fantastic, soaring lead single and probably the best rowing-based video in pop history. It was a gauntlet thrown down to all the young bucks threatening to knock them off their perch, and one which has yet to be picked up, though I’m not sure Niall from One Direction has the upper body strength to pick up anything heavier than a tea towel.

5.       Nobody wants to see Gary get all fat and beardy again. Gary’s from my home town, and while in his post-solo-career-failure twilight zone, he moved back into his mum’s house for a bit. In an attempt to go incognito, he grew a massive beard and started wearing jogging bottoms. A friend of my brother’s saw him in the pub having a steak dinner, stood up and shouted, “IT’S GARY BARLOW!” at him. Gary looked up at him sadly, down at his bloated stomach, then back down at his steak. Don’t let this happen to him again. Just give £5 a month to Barlow Relief and help bribe Robbie back into the gang. You can make a difference.

5 Reasons Why... Pixie Lott can bore off.

1.       She has no discernible personality whatsoever. Judging by her interviews, she has absolutely no opinions on anything at all. If you touched her, she would feel like a dense mist. Breathe the mist in and you’ll smell that disinfectant they use in hospitals. She’s essentially the Qui-Gon Jinn of pop.

2.       The video for ‘Kiss the Stars’. Lott’s latest single is a very poor show, even leaving aside for a moment the ropey eurotrance synths and, in “Put the plug in the socket give me all your power”, its inclusion of quite the least appealing sexual innuendo in pop since 50 Cent asked us to lick his lollipop. The CGI budget appears to have been about thirty quid, most of which was spent on sandwiches; the heavily polygon’d dancers have wandered straight out of FIFA 97, and there are close-ups which make her look like she’s falling backwards through a time vortex from a mid-70s episode of Doctor Who. Most horrifyingly of all, she has her hair in a high ponytail which makes her look exactly like X Factor reject Katy Brucknall, the one with a voice that could bend a girder at fifty paces and a quite alarming Messiah complex. I thought I’d expunged her, but back she comes, rolling into my brain strapped to a flaming Catherine wheel. Cheers Pixie.

3.       Her Twitter feed is both boring and infuriating. Many pop stars have names for their Twitter followers: Marina has her Diamonds; Cher Lloyd has Brats; Sir Alan Sugar has his Sugar-tits. Pixie Lott has, in the most excruciating, cutesy, funky-primary-school-teacher way, her ‘Crazy Cats’. This kind of sickening infantilism was meant to have been purged from the charts when the Tweenies’ second album bombed (sources close to the band reported tensions in the studio due to musical differences between Milo and Fizz). I did think Lott was quite cool before I started following her, but the amount of pictures of fried breakfasts she tweets have rather ruined her mystique.

4.       She stole VV Brown’s career. Lott launched herself – and I say ‘launched’ in the same sense that during sieges in the Middle Ages, dead cows and horses would be launched into enemy camps in order to spread disease and weaken them for attack – at roughly the same time as the extremely lovely VV Brown. Brown was armed with ‘Shark in the Water’, named the best single of 2009 at the 5 Reasons Why... Awards (known internationally as the FRYs). Lott had a cracking set of pins. Poptown wasn’t big enough for the both of them (literally – VV Brown is about 6 foot 3). Lott went on to the top 10 and a starring role in Fred: the Movie, the main joke of which is that the main character is slightly sped up and screams a lot. VV Brown modelled for Marks & Spencer. Poor old VV.

5.       She won’t return my calls. :’(

5 Reasons Why... Nicola is the best Girl Aloud by roughly a billion miles.

1. Well it’s not Kimberley or Nadine, is it. No, it isn’t. Not while Nadine worked with Boyz II Men on a cover of ‘Back for Good’ which was deemed not good enough for an album which limped into the charts at number 114. Not while Kimberley’s Wikipedia page features this sentence: “In May 2011, Kimberley Walsh was named as the new face of Right Guard’s Xtreme Dry Range”. Poor Kimberley. That’s possibly the saddest sentence I’ve ever read, and I’ve read Watership Down.

2. Or Sarah Harding. I have no idea what she’s been doing since the end of the group’s last tour, but if she’s anything like me she’ll have been sitting watching Pointless all day in her pants, checking on the later career of ex-Burnley superstar Graham Branch (the Scouse Rivaldo is now coaching West Kirby Panthers, if you were wondering) and pottering round Morrison’s trying to fathom what the difference between ketchup and catsup is (still no idea). These are all activities which have done precisely nothing for the advancement of pop. If she’s not going to bother being a pop star, less deserving sorts will capitalise. Nobody wants Mike Posner getting his foot in the door. SORT IT OUT, HARDING.

3. Or Saint Cheryl, the patron saint of kicking toilet attendants in the face. Wor Cheryl has a fairly extensive rap sheet: allegedly racially motivated assault, two very dodgy albums and her insistence on employing Will.I.Am, thereby encouraging him to think he has something to offer humanity, are heinous to put it mildly. Add to that the charge of making Ashley Cole think that another human being could be capable of loving him, and you’ll understand why she should be run out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob.

4. Nicola is ace... Cinderella’s Eyes is a great album, a riot of different influences which pings and fizzes all over the pop spectrum. That ‘Beat of My Drum’ didn’t spend three months at number one is a pop travesty on a par with Dane Bowers and Victoria Beckham’s ‘Out Of Your Mind’. Apart from her assorted qualities, the fact that the professional cretin and walking anti-obesity campaign Chris Moyles called her a “sour-faced old cow” is reason enough to root for her.

5. ...against all the odds. She is from Runcorn, a town I know all too well. If you’ve never been, ensure this description is the closest you ever come to it: numerous biological studies have suggested that the locals are genetically closer to reptiles than humans. The only amenities in town are the bingo hall and the theatre, where everyone goes to watch endless repeats of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and talk about the good old days when Ralf Little would occasionally visit the bingo hall. Her career isn’t just a victory for pop; it’s a victory for the human spirit in the face of the most unfortunate circumstances.

5 Reasons Why... Example is a tedious bollock.

1.       He lacks any ambition whatsoever. In an interview, Example has pledged to keep making the dismal vaguely-ravey-but-without-the-poppers pop which is festering around the top 40 currently. The following quote made me deeply morose for a good week or so: “I have a formula now. Some people try to be too creative and too artistic.” O Icarus! Fly not too close to the sun, lest your waxen wings melt and you find yourself ditched head-first into the HMV bargain bin. He continues: “The people want uplifting rave music, so I think, why not simply five the people what they want?” Because, to quote Super Hans, ‘people’ like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust ‘people’.

2.       He’s a Jack-of-some-trades, master of being a knob. He describes his career trajectory in his Twitter bio as “Started off singing. Then rapping. Now back to singing. But still rap occasionally.” Upon waking from the stupor this enthralling account has put us in, we can examine exactly how true this is. Does lethargically murmuring the same two or three notes count as singing? No. His rapping “skills” are making Biggy Smalls spin in his grave, and when you consider how fat he was that’s going to have some serious seismological consequences.

3.       He would make an appalling boyfriend. In another peach of an interview, Example outlines his idea of a ‘good date’. He would take the unfortunate lady to Pizza Express, as "if I go [there] I'm guaranteed to get asked for maybe 20 pictures. There's a good chance she'll want to sleep with you after that." Even if this sleazing gets you going, ladies, don’t expect him to lavish you with gifts.  “I'm good with rhyming words”, he says without any apparent sense of irony, “so I don't have to buy that many gifts; I'll just write a poem.” Very noble. And how long do you spend on these masterworks, Mr. Example? “Maybe a minute,” he says. Form a queue, girls! You’re worth a minute of his time! Maybe!

4.       He’s a total Nan kid. Nan kids don’t necessarily have to hang around with their Nan too much; there are multiple criteria for spotting one. Look at his boring Lego-man haircut. From this we can deduce much. He can’t stand having different sections of his meal touch each other, and covers the whole thing in ketchup, no matter what it is. He says “For flip’s sake!” instead of swearing properly. He can’t throw or catch. He ties his jacket round his waist when he gets too warm. He thinks that he’ll go to jail because someone smoked one joint at the only party he’s ever been to. He wears running shoes rather than shoes or trainers. He uses carrier bags to lug his belongings around. Get rid of him.

5.       Here is one of his poems I found in a bin. “Oh [insert name of girl] I love you, / Yeah I really do, it’s true, / But I think your greatest feature, / Is the way you’ll settle for an 8 inch margherita.”