Jamie Cullum

Right. People hate Jamie Cullum. This isn't (just) prejudice; I've got cast-iron anecdotal figures to back me up. As a young metropolitan gadabout, I have cause to use the Underground (on which, I'm reliably informed, the only two coffins to be transported are those of William Gladstone and Dr Barnardo). Given the vast spending power of the bored and alienated commuters, poster adverts are affixed to many of the parts of the Tube. In my broad and majestic experience, not many of these get vandalised. I've seen a few "Esso eat babies and have never cried human tears" stickers stuck on the posters of large corporations, but nothing has struck me as much as the level of permanent marker-based abuse meted out to cheery young piano-thumper Jamie Cullum.

He's pictured, grinning like an ecstasy-befuddled Jehovah's Witness at the final reckoning, leaping as a taurine-addled salmon would high above a gorgeous sunset (pictured below in its comparatively rare unvandalised state and at a daring angle because I had to leap off a Victoria Line train in order to take it, and was understandably self-conscious about being seen to jump off, brazenly take a photo of a Jamie Cullum poster and then scurry back on, looking all too excited. Worse still, I couldn't shake off the nagging fear that JC himself was seated further down the carriage, saw the whole thing, and decided to interpret it as justification to carry on his career, which he had hitherto been considering abandoning in order to do something worthwhile with his time):

I'm not exaggerating when I say that on the majority of these posters, someone has taken advantage of the expanse of light plain areas to scrawl demeaning-to-Jamie-Cullum comments speech-bubbled from the frolicking Jamie Cullum mouth. "I'm a twat", "Punch me", this sort of thing. Others, I'm sure, can vouch for this.

Now, I already hold the answer to this question, but in the interests of all things fair, what is it about JC that has so driven the normally law-abiding, if common-decency-flouting, tubegoing public to pick on Cullum so?

[Note: This post has been scanned for even the slightest trace of anti-Cullum sentiment, and as such has been passed as commendably impartial by the Society for the Impartial Treatment of Jazz-Mangling Twats]