There is something wrong with me. It has taken me months of carefully weighing up the facts to admit that I must be what society terms 'a freak'. It's not the haircut or the clothes or the accent because my malady is one that is separate from all of this.

I have lost the ability to watch television.

Thirty percent of the people reading this will have already turned away as easily as if I were an over-friendly head case that sat down next to them on the bus and started talking about their sister Betsy. The disgust that this musters from people is unbearable at times and so for a long time denial was inevitable but now the truth must come out, I must express myself, explain it all so that all those like me can rehabilitate themselves into the ways of television once more.

Hiding from ridicule has been an easy task since nothing much really changes from one week to the next and as long as you are aware of seasonal variations then you could spend three hours talking to a total stranger about the plot complexities of Coronation Street. Agreeing that Character A certainly shouldn't have slept with the daughter of Character B and as a result Character C was totally justified in going bezerk and killing four people because everyone will reconcile their differences at the end of the storyline. Easy.

It is, no doubt, quite easily traced back to a series of events in my youth. A program that disturbed, perhaps or a scene that echoed my own life. This would be the normal approach but I know it not to be true. It is the Teletubbies, it is Noel Bloody Edmonds and it is Jeremy Arsing Beadle.

It is a disease, TV-fever, and none of us are immune. The long evenings spent drinking until dark and smoking until light have on many occasions turned to the so-called classics like Jamie and The Magic Torch, Mr Benn, Chorlton and The Wheelies et al. As everyone throws in their little memory, a collective picture emerges of a time better than today when Noel Edmonds was never on the T.V. What we don't realise is that he always was but in his previous incarnation he was Jimmy Tarbuck and before that he was Terry Wogan. Look carefully, they are one and the same.

So our consciousness becomes clouded by our discussions and we try to impose our rose-tinted memories on the here and now. The Teletubbies become student icons instead of being shunned as the frightening ghouls that they are. We must realise the difference between memory and reality, if you watch Bagpuss tomorrow you will not like it because it is a good program but instead because it once was a good program. In eighteen years time the same will be true of the crazed psycheldia of The Teletubbies; they are this years Jamie and the Magic Torch. Magic Torch???? That's about as rational as having a television stuck in your abdomen.

So, I hear you vaguely wonder, what have I done about my television deficiency? Well that's simple, I surround myself with other things, talismen of different worlds; books, music, anything to distract me. A week ago I cracked and watched an episode of Quincey. Yesterday I watched Neighbours. And Home and Away. I am beginning slowly to succumb as I fall easily back into the predictability of the soap opera world. Columbo and his glass-eye intrigue me and worst of all my one real vice; QVC, the shopping channel. In fact, right now I'm off to watch the gay equivalent of Richard and Judy as they have a row over which is the best cake-decorating item that they are rapidly running out of.

I have become convinced that the perfect item is held in the vaults of QVC's enormous stockroom and I must find it. Until then I will fill my time with an inescapable quagmire of soap operas, kung fu movies, anything to fill the time until QVC fulfils its dread-purpose. Television has finally sucked me back into its world. I mean, after all, what would life be like without T.V. ?