Mark Andrews: Switch off the telly? There's nothing to switch on for

Quite how sitting on your backside in front of a 42in plasma screen can be considered a pastime is not explained.

It's a bit like those students who circulate their CVs to prospective employers, and list their top interest as socialising. We all know what socialising means – quaffing prodigious amounts of cheap lager before staggering home at 3am with a traffic cone on one's head. That's bound to have the captains of industry fighting over you, isn't it?

But the really surprising thing about the survey, commisioned by Santander, is not that millions of people sit at home glued to the box. It's the fact that they actually seem to enjoy it.

Now, I had always assumed that most couch potatoes simply sat in front of the TV for hours on end because they found the physical exertion in reaching for the 'off' switch too much for them. Even by remote control.

But, no, it seems that there's a growing number of people out there who look at the mind-numbing array of tedious game shows, endless repeats, cringey reality shows and shouty soap operas, and they like what they see.

While it's not difficult to see why such riveting activities as stamp collecting or fishing – surely the outdoor equivalent of watching the gogglebox – are falling out of favour, it does amaze me what Generation TV actually finds to watch.

Really, what is there on the five main channels, that anybody would make a special effort to stay in and watch?

Sure, there are some decent repeats on the nostalgia channels. The Professionals, The Sweeney, Minder, On The Buses, they're all out there if you search. But those are all 30 or 40 years old. In other words, the days when people spent their days fishing and model-making.

Some people rave about Downton Abbey, but really it's just a remake of Upstairs Downstairs. And even in its day, that was considerably less exciting than stamp collecting.

And why are people captivated for weeks on end by newsreaders and politicians trying to dance?

There was a time when I thought X Factor and BGT were mildly amusing, particularly in the early stages when the modern-day P T Barnum that is Simon Cowell looked slightly afraid when faced with oddballs with attitude. But that was before the formula was endlessly milked to death, dragged out for weeks, and subjected to an endless diet of spin-offs. And it was before we discovered that the acts had already been through a rigorous audition before they made it on to our screens, and that many of them had been head-hunted anyway.

And more to the point, it was before I had stopped to consider that the inept impressionists, tone-deaf singers and deluded dancers were not characters in some sitcom, but real people – often with troubled backgrounds – who were being wilfully humiliated on stage for a bit of cheap entertainment.

And then we come to I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! Which really ought to be renamed I'm A Celebrity, Honest! Or maybe I'm a Celebrity, Honestly! to be grammatically correct.

The star of the last series was a bloke called Joey Essex, whose celebrity status appeared to rest on the fact that he had appeared in another reality TV show, where he worked as a 'club promoter'. And he couldn't tell the time.

So let's get this straight, for a quarter of our population, their favourite pastime is watching a bloke who earns his living handing out leaflets to drunks and who can't tell the time eating a plate of kangaroo testicles.

I think I want to take up fishing.