If the new Tom Jones album is that bad, I must hear it

I've been trying to remember the name by which Tom Jones was known. "The Welsh Wizard"? No. "The Hips"? No, I must have been thinking of "Elvis the Pelvis". Was he "The Welsh Elvis"? No, that wasn't it either. Something to do with the pants they used to throw? Giving up, I Googled it. I was way off. He's "The Voice". Of course he is.

But why am I going on about Tom Jones? Well, according to a leaked email from a senior executive at Island Records, his latest album is a true stinker. "Pull back this project immediately or get my money back," the exec writes. Apparently, instead of singing catchy pop tunes such as Sex Bomb, The Voice warbles his way through a collection of dirge-like hymns. "I have just listened to the album in its entirety," the exec continues, "and want to know if this is some sick joke????"

Whether the album is intended to amuse or not, the leaked email certainly does. It has also got a lot of people talking about an album that would otherwise have passed them by, raising the intriguing possibility that the leak might have been deliberate. It's strange how such reverse psychology works. I have never knowingly bought or listened to a Tom Jones album, yet now, in a spirit of perversity, I quite want to hear this one, to find out how bad it really is.

Entire marketing strategies have even been built around this paradox. On the jacket of Toby Young's memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Julie Burchill is quoted as saying: "I'll rot in hell before I give that little b------ a quote for his book." But for the perversity to work properly, the insults have to be genuine, as that one clearly wasn't. Or at least heartfelt. In his wonderfully bitter and poignant memoir Seasonal Suicide Notes, Roger Lewis writes at length about his affection for the 1970s soap opera Crossroads. The sets were terrible, the dialogue was terrible, the acting was terrible, but reading Lewis's paean, you find yourself longing to see it again.

The younger generation has picked up on this cult of unmissable badness, too. Not long ago, my sons forced me to watch a DVD of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, because all their friends had been talking about it. It was indeed unintentionally hilarious. As one broadsheet reviewer wrote: "Unwatchable, almost unreviewable, this stupid monster movie makes the Bela Lugosi swansong Plan 9 from Outer Space look like a masterpiece."

The latest in this tradition seems to be The Last Airbender, released here in August. According to Lindy West, the Telegraph's new film blogger, "the script appears to have been run through Google Translate and back a few hundred times. Here are some words that M Night Shyamalan actually wrote down on a piece of paper for actual professional actors to say with their actual mouths: 'This time we show the Fire Nation that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs.' 'Again, I offer my condolences on your nephew burning to death in that terrible accident.' "

How can you not want to see this film? Well, it seems you can't. After some of the worst reviews in history, it made $70 million when it opened last weekend.

By the way, that phrase "true stinker", which I used at the beginning of this column, once appeared in a review of a Jeffrey Archer novel. Others have included the phrases "grindingly predictable" and "flatulent banality". Yet his loyal readers go on buying his books by the million – perhaps out of sheer morbid curiosity.