So to business in the strange bit between Christmas and New Year, and though this may not come as a shock to many people, it has come as a shock to me, having torn myself away from the digital world for a short time to spend away with the folks eating my way through 17 tonnes of food, metal and puppies while having a drip in my arm for the cider.

British Television is crap.

And not just even a little bit crap, I mean crap to the point where in a thunderstorm, you fall to your knees and shout “WHY?!?!?!” to the accompanying dramatic orchestral overture signifying that hell has landed on Earth and there are no Big Macs left in McDonalds.

Let’s examine what was put on Prime-time shall we? Endless repeats of shows older than I am, all demonstrating that TV was better in the 70s, Harry Hill’s TV Fart, where they look at all the TV that’s on and make fun of it with being that funny (and somehow that in itself, funny enough to have won an award or 12), Ant and Dec’s Boxing Day Disaster, where lots of people we care very little for show up and say something while dribbling, at which point all the animals in the audience cry out for more.

Let’s even remark on the human tragedy that is the All new Mr and Mrs on ITV, with which you are presented with three celebrity couples, all of whom you want to see how long they last with a chainsaw between the eyes. They were all so sickening to see, gushing over each other just to ensure that you know that they have everything wonderful in life and you don’t.

I want to call them all a bunch of hairless f**kers, though perhaps that’s just me being bitter that people with the intelligence of dried prunes are worshipped these days, and therefore nine times of ten it’s not even worth getting out of bed.

Oh, and to satisfy those noisy pr*ts that read trash like Heat magazine, we got to witness the most embarrassing facts like to be that the man watches football and the woman goes shopping, or owns lots of one thing. STOP THE PRESSES…I want to get off. We’ll also leave the X factor annoyances to one side as frankly it pretty much shows itself for what a frightening abomination it is.

The usual accompaniment of Soap Operas also did their best to invade the schedules like the boozy uncle which comes for Christmas and ends up staying till July or he’s burnt one of the kids.

The brief glimpses of both the major contenders on British TV, seemed to share the exact same plots now, perhaps now sharing the same writing team for cost reasons where basically if none of them have wailed and hit each other for 10 seconds, it’s considered a slow episode. Dallas was considered to be of higher educational value than any of this.

In fact, the news that an insane Nigerian was successfully halted from blowing people up by heroic passengers aboard an internal US flight came as a welcome change from finding out that someone had slept with someone else while having several other hundred relationships with various bits of fruit (not all of them human), and just on that subject as a quick aside; let’s see how long it is before the British are blamed for this tw*t by the Americans who should have been paying attention a wee bit more rather than having their 5734th burger of the day.

Back to the TV (much as I don’t actually want to) Channel 4 did its best with repeats of the Peep Show, where only 4 or 5 of the shows are actually worth watching, with huge amounts of Come dine with me, where everyone on the show you soon want all to die from Food Poisoning, thus slowly solving the world crisis on over population.

Finally on Channel 5, Heads or Tails, where contestants literally flip a coin to win Justin Lee Collins, an Ewok from the west country from what little I can tell. And maybe some sludge, who knows what is actually on Channel 5 these days?

Oh and we didn’t even get onto the endless adverts for perfume to make you smell worse than a pub toilet and numerous appeals to sponsor polar bears, pandas, African children, Prince Charles, tins of beans etc.

I could actually carry on the endless list of absolutely awful drivel that graced the screens, which we were forced to switch off the box and enjoy silence instead (none of that conversation nonsense here thank you very much, talking to other people, what will you come up with next?), but alas perhaps we should contemplate boycotting the whole lot?

Quality shows like Spooks, Screenwipe and the odd sitcom from Channel 4 are lost now forever it seems in an endless stream of made up reality shows and third rate celebrity loving train-wreaks so stupefying, I honestly believe people are becoming of lower intelligence as a result, thus all that bleeds into real life and makes the rest of us that don’t actually know about these shows question whether the idea of Natural selection is really just a load of twaddle.

But coming away from scathing remarks now, it appears the multi-channel age has finally come unstuck, where the television executives have too much air space to fill and now are forced to scramble absolutely and I mean this, absolutely anything together on a budget of £3.50 and a packet of crisps to keep us from going off to do something else. Like masturbating. Again.

Perhaps one way of solving this, is now start reducing the number of channels, thus reducing the airtime and thus ensuring that higher standards of programming, to entertain and perhaps on occasion educate have to be met in order to grace our screens given the fact air time will once again be at a premium.

After all it will mean more money will be channeled into few, better programs, rather than spread so thinly over 700 channels with nothing good on, something which given most of the channels are cutting back with at present due to budgets being tight, something else which surely will have influenced this year’s programming.

Maybe in this day and age, less will be more?

Or maybe now is the time to pitch that idea I’ve been saving for a rainy day; have like two pigs in a duffle coat fly to Egypt to fight crime. This time next week it will be on BBC One, just watch, if you can that is.