Today, Ginger Baker is probably responsible for more curled toes and tightened sphincters than anyone else alive. His Q&A with Michael Hann at the Curzon Soho is a masterclass in awkwardness. Questions are shot down. Pauses are left hanging in the air. Baker haughtily surveys the scene like a bilious animatronic skeksis. By all accounts, it ranks as one of the most excruciating interviews in recent memory.

That said, there's plenty of competition. YouTube is stuffed with painful interviews featuring monosyllabic subjects, oblivious interviewees or – in some cases – both. Here are some of my favourites.

The One Show routinely wrongfoots its celebrity guests – that tends to happen when you insist on quizzing A-listers about financial ombudsmen – but Bruce Willis managed to scale new peaks of awkwardness earlier this year. Unresponsive to the point of catatonia, he ummed and ahhed about the intricacies of Die Hard 5's title. The whole thing seemed to last for an eternity. Even longer than a regular edition of The One Show, and that's saying something.

Some interviews don't work because the interviewer simply doesn't get the subject's shtick. Even by the normal standards of professional wrestling, The Ultimate Warrior was famously unintelligible. But here, running through the crowd, flipping over sofas, growling incoherently at everyone, he was even more unpredictable than usual. It's a pity that nobody told Hall, who seemed to be sitting in a puddle of his own urine from about 20 seconds in.

Sometimes, though, a bad interview has nothing to do with the interviewee. Witness Kay Burley's ruthlessly insensitive attempts to make reality star Peter Andre cry on live television, whatever the cost. Your ex-wife has remarried. The father of her child disapproves of you. Look, here's a clip of him saying it. Look at it. Are you upset? Are you going to cry? What about now? Fortunately, Andre called the interview to a halt before Burley attacked him with a stick.

It's hard to know who to side with here. The Bee Gees were undoubtedly stuck several inches up their own bottoms at this point in their career, but then again Anderson misreads the tone so spectacularly that you have to wonder what he was thinking. The helpless look on his face when two Bee Gees have stormed off, and the third is struggling with his microphone, stands as one of the most heartbreaking things ever seen on British TV.

A classic, largely because Michael Parkinson seems determined to bring it up every time he opens his mouth. Ryan is frosty and uncommunicative. Parkinson seems unusually combative. Trinny and Susannah, of all people, are drafted in at the end to act like the children of a loveless marriage. Awful.

And then this, perhaps the daddy of them all. David Blaine appears on breakfast TV and refuses to talk. Eammon Holmes flails around, sweating and gurning in an attempt to get something – anything – from him. And then Blaine holds up a hand with an eye drawn on it, and the whole thing skids off into even weirder territory. Perhaps Michael Hann should be relieved that Ginger Baker didn't have any felt pens on him backstage.