Timeless, classic songs wrecked by tuneless, howling drunks: the karaoke machine is the most annoying gadget in Britain, a survey for the government found.

　　A TNS Omnibus poll for the Department for Communities found that the Japanese invention topped a list of gadgets that people wished had never been invented.  

　　Nearly a quarter (22 percent) of those surveyed chose the karaoke machine. 17 percent said 24-hour sports channels, 12 percent chose video games consoles, while 11 percent said mobile phones and seven percent said alarm clocks.

　　"Seeing the karaoke machine at the top of that list made me smile," said Kane Kramer, a director of the British Inventors Society.

　　"When people are singing karaoke they are enjoying themselves, but as a member of the audience you are just watching somebody who can't perform -- and isn't particularly pleasant to listen to -- for as long as you can bear it.

　　"It is anti-social. You might have 10 people who want to sing some karaoke, which means 150 people have to suffer it.

　　"But the crazy thing is that people still do go just to be a spectator at other people's inability to sing.

　　"After a short while -- unless they're very drunk -- they're going to find that listening to performers failing to perform for two hours is not the best way to spend the evening."

　　Karaoke has turned into a multibillion-dollar industry since being invented in 1971 by Daisuke Inoue, a Japanese club keyboardist looking to provide music for a customer who wanted to sing on a company trip.

　　Asked which gadgets people would like to see invented in the future, 18 percent said a robot cleaner, 16 percent said a time machine and 12 percent said a teleporter.

　　Asked what the most important safety gadgets were, 69 percent said the smoke alarm, 64 percent said seat belts and 29 percent said baby seats.

　　Pollsters TNS Omnibus surveyed 2,584 adults in England online.